And this is how fake news is made and spread in Russia:
https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/...ool-everyone/#
… (kudos to @KevinRothrock for translating it)
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And this is how fake news is made and spread in Russia:
https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/...ool-everyone/#
… (kudos to @KevinRothrock for translating it)
RT, Sputnik and the other Kremlin outlets should be considered parts of the Russian Armed Forces.
If Russia tries to crush another state by means of information then it's weapon of war and should be treated as such
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-1...us-propaganda#
"The flood of 'fake news' this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign..."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...fe_story.html#
By this morning #FSB sweepers have erased not just this #GRU op profile but all other ones where's he featured in VK
https://www.facebook.com/irakli.koma...9870680792843#
…
EU Mythbusters
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@EUvsDisinfo
ProKremlin media claim that RU pursues good neighbourly relations. What do facts say? (see the image)
http://eepurl.com/cpQaGL
A really great EU/NATO site for reports on Russian propaganda....
An excellent report that helps visualize Russia's often cloudy #propaganda & influence network in Europe. @STRATCOMCOE #subversion #NATO
After EU Commission passed restrictions this week on the various Russian propaganda media outlets and openly declares war for fake news sites and Russian disinformation......
THIS happens.....coincidence..????
EU Commission was a target for a DDOS #attack last night:
http://www.itpro.co.uk/security/2765...-cyber-attack#
Interestingly Russia declares disinformation and propaganda to be "democracy"...in their rants and media rages against this decisions of the EUC......
Another form of Russian disinformation/informational warfare....
Kremlin uses US law firm to write opinions for Armenian judges so they can influence anti-Russia court battles in EU
Rigged law, globalized
Russia is "brainwashing" Europeans, Lithuania foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tells @BBCHARDtalk
http://bbc.in/2fLNIrD
"Win without engaging in battle"- Some of theory #informationwar -from a #Russia|n perspective.
http://bit.ly/152tvrY
"The #future war will be an #invisible war.Only when a #country sees that(...)participated in the war and this #war loses."—F.#Jolot-#Curie
Winning all your battles is not of supreme importance; breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting is most important." - #SunTzu
EU Mythbusters
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@EUvsDisinfo
Racist propaganda on Russian state TV. See Digest:
http://eepurl.com/cp306n
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/18....facebook.com/
By JOHN MARKOFF
November 17, 2016
Quote:
SAN FRANCISCO — An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University.
The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like #Clinton.
Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions, said Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report. If you were looking for a real debate of the issues, you weren’t going to find it with a chatbot.
“They’re yelling fools,” Dr. Howard said. “And a lot of what they pass around is false news.”
The role fake news played in the presidential election has become a sore point for the technology industry, particularly Google, Twitter and Facebook. On Monday, Google said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook also updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.
In some cases, the bots would post embarrassing photos, make references to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, or produce false statements, for instance, that Mrs. Clinton was about to go to jail or was already in jail.
“The use of automated accounts was deliberate and strategic throughout the election,” the researchers wrote in the report, published by the Project on Algorithms, Computational Propaganda and Digital Politics at Oxford.
Because the chatbots were almost entirely anonymous and were frequently bought in secret from companies or individual programmers, it was not possible to directly link the activity to either campaign, except for a handful of “joke” bots created by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, they noted.
However, there was evidence that the mystery chatbots were part of an organized effort.
“There does seem to be strategy behind the bots,” Dr. Howard said. “By the third debate, Trump bots were launching into their activity early and we noticed that automated accounts were actually colonizing Clinton hashtags.”
A hashtag is used to indicate a Twitter post’s topic. By adopting hashtags relating to Mrs. Clinton, the opposition bots were most likely able to wiggle their way into an online conversation among Clinton supporters.
After the election, the bot traffic declined rapidly, with the exception of some pro-Trump programs that gloated, “We won and you lost,” Dr. Howard said.
Trump campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment. Twitter executives argued that more people would not follow the programs and so they would be picked up only by those who looked for particular hashtags.
“Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters’ opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works,” said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman.
The researchers based their study on a collection of about 19.4 million Twitter posts gathered in the first nine days of November. They selected tweets based on hashtags identifying certain subjects and identified automated posting by finding accounts that post at least 50 times a day.
“For example, the top 20 accounts, which were mostly bots and highly automated accounts, averaged over 1,300 tweets a day and they generated more than 234,000 tweets,” the researchers noted. “The top 100 accounts, which still used high levels of automation, generated around 450,000 tweets at an average rate of 500 tweets per day.”
The Oxford researchers had previously reported that political chatbots had played a role in shaping the political landscape that led to Britain’s “Brexit” vote.
The researchers have coined the term “computational propaganda” to describe the explosion of deceptive social media campaigns on services like Facebook and Twitter.
In a previous research paper, Dr. Howard and Bence Kollanyi, a researcher at Corvinus University of Budapest, described how political chatbots had a “small but strategic role” in shaping the online conversation during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
The bot managers seem to repurpose the programs as well. During the British campaign, they discovered that a family of bots that had been tweeting around Israeli-Palestinian issues for three or four years had suddenly become pro-Brexit. After the vote, the bots returned to their original issue.
In the case of the American election, the researchers noted that “highly automated accounts — the accounts that tweeted 450 or more times with a related hashtag and user mention during the data collection period — generated close to 18 percent of all Twitter traffic about the presidential election.”
They also noted that bots tend to circulate negative news much more effectively than positive reports.
One of the consequences of the intense social media campaigns will be a rise in what social scientists call “selective affinity.”
“Clinton supporters will cut the Trump supporters out of their network, and Trump supporters will do the same,” Dr. Howard said. “The polarization of the election is going to make this stuff worse as we self-groom our news networks.”
Here's the list of websites it says is spreading Russian propaganda
http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html?m=1#
Solid website on Russian propaganda sites....
For a less alarmist and more evidence-based approach to Russian fake news, check out @Alexey__Kovalev.
Recent piece:
https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/...ool-everyone/#
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It
Entry Excerpt:
--------
Read the full post and make any comments at the SWJ Blog.
This forum is a feed only and is closed to user comments.
Well spent time reading this Rand report on the propaganda of our time.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html#
A student in Tbilisi, Georgia, offers a window into how fake news gets made
http://nyti.ms/2g0tIoo
Neo-Nazi/white supremacist Richard Spencer’s wife is a Russian propagandist with allegiance to Putin
http://ow.ly/HkUK306wrBf
She is an active Russian social media troll.
BTW...she is directly related to the ultra Russian nationalist ideologue Dugin an closedvisor to Putin....
There is an old Stasi term that Americans investigating the fake news phenomenon may want to Google:
"Zersetzung"
EU Mythbusters
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@EUvsDisinfo
What can you do to counter fake news stories on social media? Read Digest:
http://eepurl.com/cp306n
USA Nazi wunderkind Richard Spencer admits he was married /w Nina Kouprianova aka Nina Byzantina, now separated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...d3_story.html#
THIS is interesting as it gives this Russian troll a US Green Card...there was an interesting twitter posting recently where one Russian ultra nationalist troller ie neo Nazi was boasting to his counterparts back in Moscow about his ability to get a Green Card...
https://storify.com/jayrosen_nyu/evi...iven-reporting
Evidence-based vs. accusation-driven reporting
My exchange with a journalist at USA Today illustrates what a struggle it is going to be to get this distinction established in news coverage after the 2016 election.
byJay Rosen
Quote:
This article in USA Today came across my social feed a few days ago: Trump supporters target George Soros over protests. It's about the accusation in some quarters on the right that Soros is behind the protests that sprang up after the election that made Donald Trump president-elect. On Apple News the headline was: George Soros blamed for secretly funding Trump protests.
None of the 1,300 words in the article presents any evidence that this charge is true. (Seriously: none.) The entire "plot" of the piece is that accusations have been made, the people accused say the charges are baseless, and USA today found zero evidence to undermine their defense. The accusers include some of the least reliable people on the internet, including the notorious fantasist, Alex Jones of the Infowars site.
If you are evidence-based you lead with the lack of evidence for explosive or insidious charges. That becomes the news. If you are accusation-driven, the news is that certain people are making charges. With the details we may learn that there's no evidence, but the frame in which that discovery is made remains "he said, she said." (See my 2009 post about that.)
After the 2016 campaign, in which the winner routinely floated baseless charges — including many about the press — the unsuitability of accusation-driven news coverage should be obvious to mainstream journalists. It should be, but it is not. Watch as a USA Today tech editor responds:
This is just one exchange with one editor, so I don't want to make too much of it. But I don't want to underplay it either. The takeaway is that some journalists may be completely unprepared for what's coming, even after Donald Trump used "people are saying" to such insidious effect.
Instead of defining public service as the battle against evidence-free claims, they will settle for presenting the charge, presenting the defense, and leaving it there, justifying this timid and outworn practice with a "both sides" logic that has nothing to do with truth telling and everything to do with protecting yourselves against criticism in Trump's America. +