Pundits and Democrats ascribe to a handful of bargain-basement Russian trolls all manner of ability – including orchestrating a coup d’etat
he grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.
A few months ago, when I first described those Russian ads in this space, I invited readers to laugh at them. They were “low-budget stuff, ugly, loud and stupid”, I wrote. They interested me because they cast the paranoid right, instead of the left, as dupes of a foreign power. And yet, I wrote, the American commentariat had largely overlooked them.
Now that Robert Mueller’s office has indicted the Russian actors who are allegedly behind the ads, however, all that has changed. American pundits have gone from zero to 60 on this matter in no time at all – from ignoring the Facebook posts to outright hysteria over them.
What the Russian trolls allegedly did was “an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods”, wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. “Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,” agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.
The ads themselves are now thought to have been the product of highly advanced political intelligence. So effective were the troll-works, wrote Robert Kuttner on Monday, that we can say Trump “literally became president in a Russia-sponsored coup d’etat”.
For thoughts on the finely tuned calculations behind this propaganda campaign, the Washington Post on Saturday turned to Brian Fallon, a former Hillary Clinton press secretary, who referred to the alleged Russian effort as follows: “It seems like the creative instincts and the sophistication exceeds a lot of the US political operatives who do this for a living.”
Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? “Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected (Bernie) Sanders supporters ...”
The Post added a few suspicious examples of its own. The Russian trolls figured out that battleground states were important. And: they tried to enlist disgruntled blue-collar voters in what the paper called the “rust belt”.
Okay, stop here. Since when is it a marker of political sophistication to know that some states are more persuadable than others? Or to understand that blue-collar voters are an important demographic these days? (...)
i've posted some stuff about levin's work before too
it's sad and mind-blowing at the same time
and what is stunning is that people can look at this, look at the level of our govt's participation, the actual "russian" info put out there and still hold the beliefs that they do
and almost all news, esp cable news has little or no credibility
i've posted some stuff about levin's work before too
it's sad and mind-blowing at the same time
and what is stunning is that people can look at this, look at the level of our govt's participation, the actual "russian" info put out there and still hold the beliefs that they do
and almost all news, esp cable news has little or no credibility
Yeah the article I linked isn't the one I heard this morning; the others don't have transcripts up yet. But it addressed the ballot tampering threat, not twitter trolls.
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Threat being the key word and yes anyone on a computer is under threat anywhere at any time so of course there should be due diligence to prevent out and out hacking no question about that. I would reiterate though the rest of the world is under more threat from us then Russia or even China regarding election meddling mostly through the CIA.
Yeah the article I linked isn't the one I heard this morning; the others don't have transcripts up yet. But it addressed the ballot tampering threat, not twitter trolls.
2016 was likely a first attempt/dry run. They attacked at least 21 voter systems and successfully penetrated at least a handful of them.
The thing they were likely doing was probing for weaknesses and learning about the systems so that any future interference might be less obvious/easily detected.
The "nothing to see here" stance in the face of such facts strikes me as foolishly naive (or maybe politically motivated?).
Never said that, it is all true. I just don't see the problem, how are you going to stop internet trolls and bots cause essentially that is what we are talking about.
Yeah the article I linked isn't the one I heard this morning; the others don't have transcripts up yet. But it addressed the ballot tampering threat, not twitter trolls.
Never said that, it is all true. I just don't see the problem, how are you going to stop internet trolls and bots cause essentially that is what we are talking about.
