'This is cultural hacking': How Russia harvested American rage to reshape US politics

The Brisbane Times ^ | October 18, 2017 | Nicholas Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi, The New York Times

[2ndDivisionVet]

YouTube videos of police beatings on United States' streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night.

All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the centre of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election.

A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape United States' politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.

The Russian pages -- with names like "Being Patriotic,""Secured Borders" and "Blacktivist"-- cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.....

[2ndDivisionVet]

If $100,000 and some helpers can win a presidential election, someone give me $25,000 and a handful of millennials so I can run for congress next year.

[DesertRhino]

Baloney. Just give it up.. no one believes you.

[SMARTY]

It just proves that if you Liberals LOVE your discord and disunity... you’re gonna have to pay for it :)

[McGruff]

[DesertRhino]

When Wikileaks exposed Vault 7, it told us that the CIA has tools and techniques that can make a cyber-attack look like it came from anywhere they wanted to.... this is deep state Stasi crap to help Hillary.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Did Hillary give the Russians their money back yet?

[BenLurkin]

The Pinkos highjacked our culture over the last 40 years.

[headstamp 2]

LOL, the left is mad they have competition now.

[DesertRhino]

Nobody should dare tell us about these cyber attacks after Wikileaks exposed the CIA and their Umbrage project.

It is -specifically- designed to do cyber attacks and make then look like they originated somewhere that they didn’t. It had such gems as putting cyrillic letters, or Chinese in the code. Or doing the work during the normal business hours of the country to be blamed, etc.

Now they are doing it to America. And that’s completely legal since Obama removed the prohibition against using propaganda on the American people

[cgbg]

the CIA has tools and techniques that can make a cyber-attack look like it came from anywhere they wanted to....

That is step 1. Step 2 is to have agents of influence in media outlets peddle the garbage.

Hello, Operation Mockingbird meet New York Slimes.

[arthurus]

Gotta nuke Moscow to get revenge for Trump’s election.

[arthurus]

As explanations fall apart they are patched back together with ever more improbable subexplanations and invented elements. Wheels within wheels.

[Wuli]

The amount of “Russian” stuff that was done was a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the campaigns were doing, on and off of social media, and all Americans of all stripes were doing, on and off social media, collectively giving “Russian” efforts no material political gain or loss to anyone that would not have been anyway, without “Russian” efforts.