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Active Measures, Disinfo, Propaganda

Grandioso

By Grandioso
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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

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36 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

I figured that you might need a caption to really drive it home. 

 

If you had captained the Alanis gif you might have got an A minus.  That video is too old for almost everyone, even here, to automatically make the connection, which connection should always be obvious when you are digging into your gif bag of trollin’ tricks. 

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956 Worldwide

A classic of the genre, “can you listen to a 2:45 minute stream of bullshit and refute it point by point?” Benz lies within his opening salvo by claiming that the United States overthrew the gove

Pam Cummings
Pam Cummings

String them up. Seriously. You have to make an example out of traitors.

956 Worldwide
956 Worldwide

“We spew Russian talking points totally organically, the Russian money doesn’t change our ideas” isn’t the defense Watters thinks it is. 

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Bama Chick

Bama Chick 28596

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Yeah it’s really great - and terrifying.

Anyone listening to the Yahoo! News podcast “Conspiracyland”?

It’s done by Michael Isikoff and it’s a deep dive into the conspiracy surrounding the Seth Rich murder.

It’s very well done and very well sourced and includes interviews with all the key players - his family, higher ups at the DNC, some of the conspiracy nutjobs who spread the lies, and most importantly, speaking for the first time publicly, the prosecutor assigned to the murder who got tired of hearing the nonsense and used her position and security clearances to backtrack the conspiracy stories and discovered that it originated in Russia.

And in news that won’t shock anyone, Julian Assange, Roger Stone, Mike Cernovich, and Jack Burkman are giant cockflaps.

I’m only on episode three of six so I’m sure there’s going to be more cuntpokes to add to that list.

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

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In "The Great Hack", there's a brief bit where Cambridge Analytica CEO NIx lamented that they were being singled out among a number of social media/psychographic manipulating firms.  Makes me wonder what other coordinated associations existed that he's not talking about. Only two people from CA have come forward to date.

Another important piece of the puzzle not lost on Mueller: Israel's Psy-Group

 

More from this article in 2018:

Mueller’s investigators examined a series of meetings between an Israeli social media strategist, the general blamed for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and Trump adviser Michael Flynn.

"Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the Saudi intelligence chief taking the fall for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, hobnobbed in New York with Michael Flynn and other members of the transition team shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The topic of their discussion: regime change in Iran.

Keep in mind that Kashoggi was involved in trying to expose and counter the use of internet propaganda on Saudi population to consolidate authoritarian power. 

The takeaway here is that there are other less visible, less trackable operations, with affiliations to foreign military intelligence using military grade psy-ops campaigns on social media platforms to significantly alter people's behavior.  One program with links to Israeli military intelligence, Psy-Group, is linked to both Trump and Saudi's MBS.

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

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Not as sophisticated as Qanon, but spreading their propaganda the old fashioned way:

Someone should let the library know that they are being leafletted. Some, but not all, librarians were on the front lines preventing President George HW Bush from gaining access to patrons' library records among other things. While librarians will defend the right to read without censorship, they also have the right to ask users to follow the usual guidelines for donations of reading materials.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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Here is some particularly nasty propaganda.  The US has killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through sanctions and economic warfare, but what if we killed a lot more of them the old fashioned way?  I fucking hate Krasinski.  

 

Edited by Fozzz
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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

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What about Facebook? That has got to be pretty bad too. Facebook is harder for me to follow because most folks set that to private or Facebook requires a login. Twitter at least for the most part is public and even though I don't have an account, it is pretty easy to spot the bots. Every once in awhile I will use one of the bot checkers that doesn't require an account to use. They are everywhere though.

 

Edited by Mrs Whiggins
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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90538

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On 9/5/2019 at 12:59 PM, Fozzz said:

Here is some particularly nasty propaganda.  The US has killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through sanctions and economic warfare, but what if we killed a lot more of them the old fashioned way?  I fucking hate Krasinski.  

 

You are way overthinking this.  Remember, this series is funded and distributed/streamed by the libtards at Amazon.com, you know, the libtards behind The Washington Post, owned by the biggest Libtard of all, Libtard with a capital L, Jeff Bezos.

The natural progression of the TV series should have seen them doing all kinds of shit in Mexico and Central/South America, however, guess what?  Amazon.com does a lot of business in those countries.

But Venezuela?  Not so much these days.  They were low-hanging fruit.  The tagline of Ryan confronting "the forces in power in a dangerous, declining democratic regime in South America" basically leaves you with only Venezuela.

It's the same reason why the first season danced around certain countries (Saudis, etc.) and who saw bad guys from countries like Yemen (Amazon.com Prime is not available there).

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

Posted
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AIM (the other AIM) is at it again. Took advantage of 9/11 services to spread their message:

They are also up to something for the 2020 elections to "force identitariansim into the public spotlight:

They have about 6500 followers on their account. Anyone want to calculate the percentage of people who would incur a red flag?

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

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Article about Prager U. I am amazed by the amount of people who cite this YouTube channel chapter and verse. It is a very effective tool.

https://thebulwark.com/the-conservative-propaganda-site-thats-best-at-owning-the-libs/

 

Quote

 

The Conservative Propaganda Site That’s Best at Owning the Libs

There was a time when PragerU warned about the perils of nationalism. These days? Not so much....
...Why not just ignore PragerU? The site claims that its videos have been viewed more than 2 billion times. These ideas don’t stay in the confines of the propaganda machine.
 
.......Republicans have so abandoned governing that the fight is all they have. Fighting with the left, and with anyone on the right who is insufficiently battle-ready. It’s how Sohrab Ahmari is able to make a case for authoritarian theocracy, and how Kurt Schlicter keeps getting attention even though he’s written books reflecting white genocide paranoia. It’s how Steve King keeps getting sent back to Congress.

 

 
More at link.
 
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F250

F250 29170

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22 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Article about Prager U. I am amazed by the amount of people who cite this YouTube channel chapter and verse. It is a very effective tool.

https://thebulwark.com/the-conservative-propaganda-site-thats-best-at-owning-the-libs/

 

 
More at link.
 

The gradual evolution of the initial rejection to acceptance of nationalism and then promotion of it by Republicans has been shocking. I actually had a guy I know that is a big follower of Prager ask me "Why is it wrong to be a nationalist?" Total mind fuck because the obvious answer was that every fucking kid in America was taught that nationalism was wrong and it's what the United States fought against in WWII. Culturally we all have been groomed to view Nationalism and Communism as antithetical to the American way of life. The only supporters of nationalism were freaks way out on the fringe up until the last couple of years when it was normalized by Trump.

 

 

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Hugo Stiglitz

Hugo Stiglitz 23367

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9 minutes ago, F250 said:

The gradual evolution of the initial rejection to acceptance of nationalism and then promotion of it by Republicans has been shocking. I actually had a guy I know that is a big follower of Prager ask me "Why is it wrong to be a nationalist?" Total mind fuck because the obvious answer was that every fucking kid in America was taught that nationalism was wrong and it's what the United States fought against in WWII. Culturally we all have been groomed to view Nationalism and Communism as antithetical to the American way of life. The only supporters of nationalism were freaks way out on the fringe up until the last couple of years when it was normalized by Trump.

 

 

We were also raised to have nationalistic tendencies.  The pledge of allegiance in schools, the worship of the military, American exceptionalism.  

Nationalism masquerading in plain sight, no one really called it out though.

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

Posted
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41 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We were also raised to have nationalistic tendencies.  The pledge of allegiance in schools, the worship of the military, American exceptionalism.  

Nationalism masquerading in plain sight, no one really called it out though.

Funny you pointed that out; between football games recently I saw a rebroadcast of a talk given by a prof at Indiana about the KKK in the Midwest (back in the beginning of the 20th century). It (the Klan) had a different flavor than what most people think of when you speak of the KKK. Very mainstream, with adverts in the local papers, sponsoring athletic teams, and pretty much everybody's All-American (as long as they are the 'right' kind of American).

 

Here is the link to what I watched: Be warned though, his voice is somewhat soporific!

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460982-1/ku-klux-klan-1920s-midwest

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F250

F250 29170

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55 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

We were also raised to have nationalistic tendencies.  The pledge of allegiance in schools, the worship of the military, American exceptionalism.  

Nationalism masquerading in plain sight, no one really called it out though.

Some of that was Eisenhower's push for civil religion. The idolizing of the military was likely a reaction to Vietnam that became a thing during Desert Storm and then morphed into the bizarre shit we have today.

Edited by F250
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DixonHur

DixonHur 11938

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Hillary saying publicly what many of us have proposed on here...Tulsi Gabbard will run as a 3rd party candidate backed by Russia to help Trump win reelection.

"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary," Clinton said, with the "they" being the Russians. "And they're grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."

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Hugo Stiglitz

Hugo Stiglitz 23367

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30 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Yes, her last name is a punchline but her real story is nuts and it all goes back to Manafort having a vendetta because she put his shit on blast. 

 

To hear her story, this interview is great:

Chalupa has been blowing the whistle on all the Russia/Ukraine shit for years and the Kremlin does not like her. 

Full interview here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/alexandra-27409858

The Alexandra Chalupa Interview

This week on Gaslit Nation we continue our interview with Andrea’s sister Alexandra Chalupa, the former DNC contractor who was one of the first people in the US to warn officials about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. For the first time, Alexandra tells her story in depth in her own words, including how she discovered new Riker’s Island inmate Paul Manafort was conspiring with Russian actors to help Trump win, her unheeded warnings to the DNC about email hacks and Wikileaks, and the terrifying aftermath of the 2016 election, when she was threatened and libeled by multiple high-profile individuals connected to the Trump administration, including Manafort, Rudy Giuliani, Julian Assange, Sean Hannity, FOX News, Sputnik, and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. 

Alexandra discusses how Kremlin active measures are employed in the US and warns that their methods will continue unless US officials contend with the gravity of the crisis and prevent hostile actors from doing further harm. She also discusses the role of the mainstream media in exacerbating this crisis, including New York Times reporter Ken Vogel, who smeared Alexandra before going on to smear Joe Biden’s son and others while using questionable sources. She sheds light on what it’s like to be a young mother thrust into a national security crisis simply because she insisted on telling the truth, and reflects on our obligations as citizens to keep speaking out.

Edited by Hugo Stiglitz
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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13050

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Speaking of micro-targeting, that rang a bell with me. I occasionally check several twitter accounts that have links and stories I like to read. Wendy Seigelman is one and she was reporting on this fellow lately:

One of the things he is accused of (sorry, I'm not great at posting the part of the tweet I want, so scroll down a little) has to do with this database of Americans (some reside in Virginia which is I believe where the case was filed). He and a co-conspirator had their fingers in a lot of cybercrime pies.

So, that reminded me of something else I had seen on a DevinCow account:

If you go to the tweet above and read the whole thread, it talks about who the players are behind this "new" old company (one, a  businessman named Bill Dallas, convicted of embezzlement) and how they used that data. Their headquarters is now in Southlake, TX. It also delves into the relationship between one of their directors was part of the NRA delegation that went to Russia (that's the trip I mentioned in the WSJ journal that was posted in the impeachment thread #6710. The trip was arranged by Maria Butina).

Quote

As Bill Dallas (President of UiP & USATF) said, “We have about 200 million files, so we have pretty much the whole voting population in our database... What we do is track to see what’s going to make somebody either vote one way, or not vote at all.”

Like Fiona Hill said, they are here and they are active and they are coming for us. (America) Be prepared. The domestic enemies aligning with the Russians is what I find despicable.

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

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Good NYT read: former Fox News host lays out the Fox formula for daily manipulation of the public:

Why Fox News Slimed a Purple Heart Recipient: As a former talk-show guest host on the channel, I can explain the art and purpose behind attacking Colonel Vindman.

Quote

By Tobin Smith

Mr. Smith is the author of “Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare.”

Nov. 22, 2019

In anticipation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s recent public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a guest concocted an insulting fantasy on her show: the idea that Colonel Vindman might be a Ukrainian spy.

It may have shocked a lot of Americans that Fox News televangelists and establishment conservatives like John Yoo are spinning the “narrative” of the courageous Colonel Vindman — a man who put his country’s interests ahead of his own — into one that suggests, as an immigrant, he wasn’t loyal to the United States. But as a former Fox News opinion talk-show guest host and contributor for 14 years, it didn’t shock me.

I can explain the art and purpose behind throwing a Purple Heart veteran under the Fox News bus. First, we must talk about narratives. In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation, what the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller defines in “Narrative Economics” as “contagious stories” — as he put it in a paper of the same name, “a simple story or easily expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others, and/or because it appears to advance self-interest.” One recent report said that we find information or misinformation “22 times more memorable in narrative form.”

There’s little in this world that has the emotional manipulative power of a good tribalized — us versus them — narrative. It’s a contagion, and thanks to social media, or “participatory propaganda,” highly viral.

The Fox News counternarrative model is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now (in 2019, that’s the most recent damaging attack — House impeachment hearings — on President Trump). The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible?

The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the “Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge. In the old days, the memo from the C.E.O. Roger Ailes dictated the narratives of the day. The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.

What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?

Conspiracy theories.

Why do people love conspiracy stories? It’s human behavior. Being in on a good conspiracy theory makes you feel like you know something the other guy — in this case, any liberal — does not. The emotional payoff from being on the inside of a conspiracy is a self-esteem jolt that makes you feel smarter than your tribal foe and keeps your eyeballs glued to screens — television, laptops, tablets, cellphones — where the network makes money from advertising.

The Vindman coverage followed the Fox News conspiracy segment playbook perfectly. In the days after Fox News produced it, the spy tale was distributed by other dealers of conspiracy theory. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted that “Donald Trump is innocent. The deep state is guilty.” The congressman’s message was amplified by an account tied to the online conspiracy movement QAnon to 160,000 of its followers as well as posted on a QAnon Facebook page.

If some of those who consumed the story go back to the original source, Fox, it’s more business for the network.

Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the “proof” of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well. It elevates the fight-or-flight juices. And it helps when a proposed conservative thought leader mixes in the meta-narrative to the effect that “we are victimized again by the condescending Beltway elites.”

Weaponized and tribalized political video narratives in the hands of Fox News producers can become something like drug-abuse epidemics — keeping addicts of that conspiracy theory high and coming back for more.

Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.

And that is why they wrote Colonel Vindman into the wrong side of a spy novel.

 

 

Edited by triplehorn
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Anastasis

Anastasis 23699

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Interesting new study related to the influence of Russian social media activity on political attitudes and behaviors.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/20/1906420116

Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017

Abstract

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study—especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election—as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.

Some of the key findings.

Fig. 1 presents standardized coefficients from this model, showing that the strongest predictor of IRA interaction is the strength of respondents’ echo chambers (measured as the percentage of political accounts they follow that lean toward the respondent’s own political party). The 2nd strongest predictor of IRA interaction is overall political interest, followed by frequency of Twitter usage. Though Republicans appeared more likely to interact with IRA accounts than Democrats, this association is not statistically significant. To summarize, our initial analysis indicates that the respondents most likely to interact with trolls were those who may be least susceptible to persuasion effects—because of their more entrenched political views.

Fig. 2 reports the ATTs of interacting with IRA accounts on each of the outcomes in our model with intervals derived from the 97.5th and 2.5th quantiles, respectively. These effects were standardized to have a mean of 0 and SD of 1 to facilitate interpretation. As this figure shows, IRA interaction did not have a significant association with any of our 6 outcome variables. Figs. 3–5 plot the individual treatment effects of troll interaction against the variables associated with troll interaction, collapsed into binary categories to facilitate interpretation. Fig. 3 shows no substantial differences in the effect of troll interactions, according to level of political interest across each of our outcomes. Figs. 4 and 5 report no substantial differences for frequency of Twitter usage or party identification, though there is a suggestive difference between Republicans and Democrats in change in the number of political accounts that respondents followed. We observed no other heterogeneous treatment effects by all other covariates in our models either (SI Appendix).

 

Edited by Anastasis
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