Free Republic

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday that he expects Russia to target the 2020 US presidential election with social media campaigns, fake news and propaganda in a bid to divide Americans and “pit us against each other.” Wray, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, said that as in the 2016 election, Russia also sought to influence the 2018 US mid-terms and he expects more of the same next year. “What has continued pretty much unabated is the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, false personas etc. to spin us up,” he said. Russia’s intelligence agencies...

Why People Troll By Philip Cottraux Imagine someone whose life never took off the way they wanted. For whatever reason, they are now stuck in a miserable situation; a dream career never came to be and they still live in mom’s basement. Their life is parasitic and they know it. The only thing that brings them any relief is tearing down others. Those who don’t create can only try to destroy. It’s a sad fact that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel. Abusive childhoods are breeding grounds for adult addictions. Traumatic events that occur while the brain...

One of the tells that the special counsel investigation of Robert Mueller is, if not an outright sham and fraud, an exercise in self-justification is the charges brought so far. Once you eliminate the charges that have zero to do with the 2016 Trump campaign (that would be the cases against Paul Manafort) you are left with some real hardcore chickensh**–Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, Alex van der Zwaan–and some cases that Mueller was confident he’d never have to prosecute–Russians who will never be extradited to the United States. The flimsiness of the cases against all the Russians is...

This thread is a friendly collaborative place for FReepers to analyze information and share opinons. FReepers have a wide variety of reasons for investigating Q Anon content; this is not the appropriate place to criticize or badger those who choose to use some of their time in this manner. This thread is a continuation of the prior Q Anon thread located here: http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3636549/posts I plan to post one thread at a time and ping new drops posted to it. The current schedule is to post new threads Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. When I post each (new) thread, the prior thread...

FULL TITLE: Charlie Gard’s Parents Receive Hate Emails: You’re “Selfish Frauds” Who “Don’t Give a S— About Charlie” Connie Yates and Chris Gard just wanted to give their son, Charlie, a chance at life. For months, they have been battling for the right to take their son to the United States for an experimental treatment and only gave up earlier this week when medical experts said their no longer is any hope for Charlie. Possibly at their lowest moment yet, the British family said they are receiving hate mail criticizing them for fighting for their son, The Sun reports. One...

We’ve all had it with incessant attacks by vicious Internet trolls, but when Hannity “had enough” he decided to do something about it. Warning to Internet trolls, reputation ruiners, serial sexual harassment and racist accusers with no backup evidence. In fact to all stealth stalkers roaming the Net 24-7 seeking the destruction of Conservatives: Radio and television host Sean Hannity is coming to get you. That he will take no prisoners has millions of Internet users over the moon.

MOSCOW -- For three straight days last weekend, the employees of the Novaya Buryatia newspaper in southern Siberia used scissors to remove an article from 50,000 copies of the weekly before it could be distributed. The same article, which had been posted a few days earlier on the paper's website, was pulled down. (It can be seen in an archived file here.) As a result, an article that was intended to clear up some mysteries involving alleged Russian military participation in the fighting in eastern Ukraine has itself become the center of a mystery: Is this a case of Soviet-style...

Local reporters have infiltrated a covert organization that hired young people as “Internet operators” near St. Petersburg and discovered that the employees are being paid to write pro-Kremlin postings and comments on the Internet, smearing opposition leader Alexei Navalny and U.S. politics and culture. [....] According to Lvova, each commenter was to write no less than 100 comments a day, while people in the other room were to write four postings a day, which then went to the other employees whose job was to post them on social networks as widely as possible. Employees at the company, located at 131...