Twitter Says It Exposed Nearly 700,000 People To Russian Propaganda During Election (theverge.com) 302
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Twitter this evening released a new set of statistics related to its investigation on Russia propaganda efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including that 677,775 people were exposed to social media posts from more than 50,000 automated accounts with links to the Russian government. Many of the new accounts uncovered have been traced back to an organization called the the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, with known ties to the Kremlin. The data was first presented in an incomplete form to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last November, which held hearings to question Facebook, Google, and Twitter on the role the respective platforms and products played in the Russian effort to help elect President Donald Trump. Twitter says it's now uncovered more accounts and new information on the wide-reaching Russian cyberintelligence campaign.
"Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period," writes Twitter's public policy division in a blog post published today. "Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available."
"Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period," writes Twitter's public policy division in a blog post published today. "Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available."
Twitter? What is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Meanwhile... (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest of the world just takes it as a given that they're being exposed to American propaganda.
There is a huge whiff of "us be bad guys, us get taste of own medicine? Unpossible!"
Maybe if the Democrats had run Sanders and not Felonia Von Pantsuit, they wouldn't have given the Russians such a target-rich environment.
Look, it's not hard. If Clinton were the Foreign Minister of any of our NATO allies, her government would have put her in prison for a very long time for even a third of what she's accused of doing.
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Most NATO countries are civilized, civilized countries doesn't put people in jail because of accusations.
Turkey isn't civilized. Many reasons for that, sadly.
The US isn't civilized - Guantanamo anyone?
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Then you're willfully obtuse and willfully ignorant. Anyone else would be serving many, many decades in prison for mishandling classified evidence and then obstruction of justice in destroying the evidence. Hillary had no more authorization to store the far more serious and larger quantities of cl
Re:Not just propaganda though is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hacked the DNC and DCCC,
Allegedly.
hacked elections systems in several states, grabbing electoral data.
Allegedly.
Handing the electoral data and political information to people like Aaron Nevins and defacto co-ordinating with them to get Ron DeSantis elected in Florida
Allegedly.
There are plenty of allegations flying around that this was all Russia's doing. It very well may have been. What is lacking is evidence.
It would be politically expedient for the US if it were Russia behind the meddling. It may or may not be politically expedient for Russia to have Trump as president. Hillary was a known quantity to Russia. They've dealt with her before as Secretary of State. Knowing how someone operates is diplomatically valuable.
Trump *seemed* to be more friendly to Russia, but he was also incredibly flaky, even as a candidate. The reasoning behind a coordinated push to back Trump over Hilary seems tenuous at best.
Have you read the testemony from that firm (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yes. That is what a witness report is
But we don't even have those. We have officials saying they have evidence. There might be witness reports. There might be forensic evidence (which is even more questionable when it comes to the DNC server hacks, as the DNC used a private firm to do the analysis and not the FBI.)
What do you expect? That they are going to go into Trumps office and find a box labeled "proof" containing a bag of "hacks" and gloves with traces of electoral data on them?
I expect an explanation as to why the FBI/DNC/whomever is making the allegation, as to why they believe the Russian government was involved directly beyond "trust us we have evidence." These are serious allegations. They require soli
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As another poster said, you don't even have that. What you do have is the same amount of evidence that the Birthers had that Obama's birth certificate was faked so he could run for the presidency. Assertions are not evidence - just ask the Birthers.
The investigation is bullshit. If it wasn't, the first thing Mueller would have done would hav
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Every democrat since at least the 30's has been smeared as a communist, but that hasn't prevented them from winning. Which means your talking point is crap.
Hypocrites (Score:2, Interesting)
What about twitters own people saying on video they wish to "ban a way of talking" from "shitty people"... their words. Forget russia what about twitter's own propaganda via censorship?
14 people per account (Score:2)
If this really was a disinformation campaign, it wasn't even vaguely successful.
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How many of those tens of thousands of followers came from Russian Twitter farms?
Emails about receiving tweets with false content? (Score:2)
Twitter would melt down overnight if they enforced this in an even remotely evenhanded way.
Because altering trends isn't ? (Score:3, Informative)
Changing the trending section to show TrumpShutdown instead of SchumerShutdown, even though a basic Civics class and understanding shows clearly that this is a Democrat action isn't propaganda ?
Removing the hashtag Release the memo from trending because a left leaning PAC said something about Russian bots isn't propaganda ?
Twitter please. And they say right wingers are prone to believing conspiracies.
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Exactly. The translation of all this is "the candidate we were supporting with everything we had lost, and we're gonna get even by whatever lies we have to tell".
Um... no. Just no. (Score:2)
The Republicans have a huge edge here. For one thing they control all branches of the government. For another their largely indifferent to DACA & C
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CHIP is fully funded in the current Republican budget that passed the House and the Dems blocked in the Senate.
As for DACA most Republicans, including Trump, have already stated they are ok with allowing the current DACA recipients to stay but want to end other immigrations problems such as chain migration and the visa lottery; two system that effectively allow tens of thousands of immigrants into the country with no skills requirement. There may be some back and forth about funding the wall but if the Dem
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To be fair the Dems aren't out to protect us all that much either. If they were they'd do something about the 500,000 [usatoday.com] workers here on expired visas, most of whom came here on H1-Bs. I don't really care about 'chain' migration because that's mostly Mexicans taking low pay service jobs.
But anyway, Trump could send those 500k illegal aliens (expired visas, so the term fits) back any time he wants. With the stroke of a pen. He co
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So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm fairly sick of Twitter and Facebook going on about this. The Internet is full of propaganda. The world is full of propaganda. We should not be surprised if Russia meddled a bit, because we meddle in everyone else's affairs, especially in the Middle East. I don't like Trump much either, but the fact is that people are using this merely as a way to comfort themselves about him having won the election. But does it really make a difference? Were we really naive enough to think that democracy was truly fair in the first place?
Let's think about this rationally. 700,000 were exposed; that's a tiny number. A Google search says that almost 139,000,000 voted. So that means that about 0.5%--a mere half percent of voters may have been exposed. But chances are that only some of those who were exposed actually voted. And then most of them probably already were Trump supporters in the first place, who merely grabbed hold of the propaganda as confirmation of their already-held point of view. So it's impossible to say how much it affected the vote--especially given the complexities of the electoral college and the fact that we do not know where these viewers lived--but chances are that it did not affect it enough to have swayed anything.
Or let's put it another way: the burden of proof would be on those who would claim that Russia actually changed the outcome of the election. Prove it. I sincerely doubt that it will ever be proved, but people will go on and on about it because it gives them a kind of comfort to think that it was really the fault of some sinister external force. People love blaming outsiders, or even internal minorities who are treated as outsiders--such as Mexicans like myself--but it is a sad, pathetic, illegitimate comfort.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hard to say with only incomplete information, but what little commentary I have seen on he Russian efforts suggests it wasn't aimed just at electing Trump. It was aimed to fuel division and increase hostility by producing material aimed at both left and right to convince them that the opposing faction are not merely in disagreement, but are a dangerous and evil force that must be fought and exterminated, and that only traitors seek compromise.
They saw a trend that was to their favor. They pushed further in that direction.
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Because "painting republicans as evil" hasn't been a thing for decades in the US right ?
I've lived a somewhat decent span a time (born in the 70s) and all my life I heard about how Republicans are evil, from all sorts of media and publication.
So even that line of "sow division" is tired. No one needed the Russians to do that. Especially not with the current climate in academia, where outside "black blocks" come in and torch Berkerley over a conservative speaker.
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Russia benefits from Americans being more divided and busy fighting each other instead of digging up dirt on Russian black-bag jobs, imposing more sanctions, and so forth. Russia does not necessarily heighten those divisions with the goal of helping any particular American faction.
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American Exceptionalist Swiftboating. It's not Russia that has illegally invaded more than half a dozen nations over the last 15 years, had a kidnapping & torture program, allows its military to round up citizens on its own soil without a trial, and wants to spy on the communications of every person on the planet, including allied heads of state.
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To do.......what? Of all the completely evidence-free conspiracy theories making up Russiagate, this is one of the dumber ones. Not to mention insulting - does anyone actually think that minorities only became aware tha
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Multiply one unit of bullshit by a thousand and what do you have?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
This Russian ad spend was on the order of a few hundred thousands dollars. A couple hundred thousand does nothing when applied to large numbers of people. Put into perspective that the candidates spent two billion dollars.
You can then try to make the argument that the Russians highly focused the ads on to a specific target group. But that rapidly turns into preaching to the choir. It is easy to get a highly targeted group to do what the ads imply, that is simply because they were very likely to do whatever it was anyway. But there is no way that 700,000 people is a tightly selected group like that.
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You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
That's some excellent reasoning if we're talking about ads, but it seems to me that you're responding here to something else that failed to fully engage your attention (TFS)--even though it provoked you to write a reply. This isn't about "Internet ads" that people were merely "exposed" to. The fact that someone actually followed a troll account, or liked or reposted a "tweet" proves that they were actually engaged and inspired to take action based on its content.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
It's fairly safe to assume that actual human Twitter users follow bots, even when they donâ(TM)t know those accounts are in fact bots. So even if all 700k Russian propaganda followers were bots they still amplified the original message to all of their followers, some portion of whom are humans.
The situation is worse when you consider the retweets from people with large numbers of followers. All it takes is some non-bot with a lot of followers to massively amplify a propaganda message. If people are get
I think you're missing the big piece (Score:2)
You're also forgetting what they ads were like. They weren't 'vote Trump!' ads. They were targeted to Trump voters. They were there to rile up and scare Trump
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And then most of them probably already were Trump supporters in the first place, who merely grabbed hold of the propaganda as confirmation of their already-held point of view
That's the most important point. Being exposed is not the same as being influenced. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who subscribed to those accounts changed their vote because of what they read there.
We shouldn't be surprised (Score:2)
And I recognize there are a _lot_ of mentally vulnerable people out there. It's too difficult and risky to bar them from voting. It's also tough to get the right information to them, but we can at least try. We can also invest in teaching people critical thinking and making them aware that propaganda exists.
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That is a very naive way of looking at the Russian meddling. Russia does not have the interest of any US citizen, either Democrat or Republican. The US does not meddle in the elections of other normal democratic countries like Russia does.
Russia meddled in the 2016 US election. It meddled the UK Brexit referendum. Russa has launched a campaign to influence Mexico’s 2018 presidential election. Marcon's team said that their servers were hacked by a group likely to be associated with Russians during t
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For information on the Russian interference in the French election see this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Here is the relevant bit.
In March 2017, Macron's digital campaign manager, Mounir Mahjoubi, told Britain's Sky News that Russia is behind "high level attacks" on Macron, and said that its state media are "the first source of false information". He said: "We are accusing RT (formerly known as Russia Today) and Sputnik News (of being) the first source of false informat
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https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
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Not the exposed, only the interacted (Score:2)
Those exposed will be multi-millions.
"... also removed more than 220,000 third-party apps responsible for millions of suspicious tweets ..."
And that's only the little bit the Russians did. My gut feeling is the game was much bigger still. The real totals will be appreciated only after it's not affecting.
So, 0.5% of the registered voters! (Score:2)
Wow. They reached 0.5% of the registered voters. With an indeterminate effect on even those. That's pretty much a failure.
When will the sore Hillary! losers stop looking for someone else to blame, for their election failure?
Wow! 700K... (Score:2)
Out of 330M or so...one person in 500 was "exposed" to Russian bad-thought, which isn't the same as "one person in 500 changed their vote to Trump as a result of Russian bad-thought....
Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. It's not like people weren't exposed to foreign media regularly, all of which talked about the American Presidential elections at one time or another (it does,after all, have a moderately enormous affect on the world as a whole).
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Like the $5000 on Facebook ads (many of which were anti-Trump or hawking Obama merchandise) in an election where Hillary spent a biiiiiiilion dollars.
I thought the left loved Russia? (Score:2)
Now Russia is associated with right-wing conservatism? WTF? When did this happen?
It's almost as if the left is using the time honoured tactic of accusing the opposition of doing exactly what you are doing.
For example, hypothetically, let's suppose the DNC paid to have Russian sources create a phony dossier, then use that dossier to get a FISA warrant to spy on the opposition party.
That would certainly be collusion on the part of the DNC and Russia. And what better way to distract the public than to blame Tr
It's almost as if you're completely unwaware... (Score:2)
FTFY. And of course its Swiftboating - everything Hillbots have b
Twitter and Facebook to Americans: (Score:2)
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We have no idea what Mueller has, but the people he is handing subpoenas to is highly interesting.
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have no idea what Mueller has, but the people he is handing subpoenas to is highly interesting.
Either Mueller really has some dynamite shit on trump that we don't know about; or he will become biggest lamb to the slaughter house in history since about AD 36 or so when Lidia the mother of Tiberius died. The back stabbing and bullshit going on in Washington since Trump started his rise to power before the coming of Obama is in many ways similar to what happened to the Roman Empire after the reign of Augustus. It is a sad situation when neighbors start to rattle sabers and defame each other and a sympto
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another wave of largely talented caring young people into our country will not hurt our economy in any way.
That's the problem. Illegals in the US are NOT largely talented or caring. The stats just do not support this tired narrative. Education is lower than the average, skillsets are lower than the average, participation in crime is higher than the average.
Also, where were you when the Canadian governement put an end to its own TPS program for Haitians in 2016 ? You say Trump is inhumane, but Canada ended their program a full 2 YEARS prior to the US. Are you saying Canada is even less humane ? Or maybe yo
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Because the U.S. has spent the last couple hundred years fucking them over. Overthrowing their governments - some multiple times - invasions, sanctions, CIA death squads, supporting military dictatorships - and then you wonder why they flee without having gon
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Either Mueller really has some dynamite shit on trump that we don't know about;
Considering the prosecutors that are willing to drop their high paid jobs to work on the case you can be pretty sure that it is something significant.
They aren't exactly nobodies that are looking to make a name for themselves. Most of them are considered to be the top name in their respective field.
It looks a lot like FBI have been investigating Trump since way before the election campaigning started and just handed everything over to Muller on his first day on the job.
But that doesn't mean it will lead any
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I hope they use that standard of evidence at your murder trial.
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Rhetorical masturbation doesn't change the fact you can't prove a negative. It's upon Russiagaters to prove their assertions, period. Otherwise, I'll simply assert that you own a sheep ranch for a harem and leave you to disprove that assertion.
Sure we do. He has nothing. If Mueller were actually serious about this, the first thing he would have done was subpoena the DNC servers for a proper FBI investigation, as the Russia-ha
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It's been like 2 years.... WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
The Mueller investigation started last May so it has been less than a year. They have been running a tight ship and none of us know the evidence and case Mueller has built against the Trump family. We know there has been 4 indictments and 2 guilty pleas. We know Mueller is getting bank records. There is a lot of smoke. Right now it appears Trump is cooked. When pigs like Sean Hannity squeal you can bet Mueller is on to something much bigger than collusion.
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Why should it work that way? It's just an easy cop out to not provide evidence. If you don't feel like participating in the discussion, then don't participate at all, instead of proudly proclaiming that you're not going to hop into in good faith.
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It should work that way because the poster is demanding evidence. It's perfectly reasonable to ask what they would accept as evidence.
If you can't even say what your standards of evidence are, you are arguing about belief, not facts.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone asks for evidence, present the most compelling and convincing evidence you have. It is a lame dodge, and implicit admission that you have nothing, to demand that someone else define a standard of evidence -- because you would then just argue about their definition instead of providing evidence.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't work because what convinces me won't necessarily convince you. That's because of differences in Bayesian prior beliefs.
Some people also like to waste your time demanding you marshal information they have no intention of looking at. It's like playing a game where they don't tell you the rules, or are free to change the rules to suit themselves.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As I said, you are more interested in arguing about standards of evidence -- with the implication that the people asking for evidence are so unreasonable that nothing will convince them -- than actually pointing to evidence.
Here's a bonus hint to not sound pretentiously ignorant: Nobody is engaging in Bayesian reasoning about this. Nobody's going to give you a prior probability that politician X colluded with the Russians on subject Y, unless politician X has been caught on tape telling the Russians how mu
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
People engage in Bayesian reasoning all the time, even if they don't know what that is. Everyone does this. If you actually believe anyone in the Trump organization would never collude with Russians, then Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin appears entirely innocent to you, even though Trump Jr. has openly admitted he was seeking Russian government supplied dirt on Clinton.
Likewise the meeting between George Papadopolous and Joseph Mifsud in which Mifsud offered a Russian government trove of emails from the Clinton campaign was perfectly innocent. Papadoploous lying about that meeting to the FBI was also a perfectly innocent mistake.
And when in response to Papadopolous's attempt to set up a meeting involving Trump Paul Manafort complained "It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal," he really meant that nobody in the campaign should be doing it.
So given that people who believe there isn't a shred of evidence of collusion aren't impressed by these fairly well-established facts attested to by the participants, I think it's perfectly legitimate to what level of evidence in your opinion constitutes "a shred"?
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Sure, people engage in Bayesian reasoning without realizing it, but mostly they don't. They engage in much less rigorous but superficially similar reasoning. It's stupid to suggest that any time you update your beliefs based on new information, it's Bayesian, because people were doing that long before Bayes came along and provided a statistically rigorous way to do it.
Why don't you define what you mean by "collusion", so that anyone else can say what kind of evidence of "collusion" they would accept? The
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Collusion is cooperation with foreign entities which a reasonable person would expect to be breaking US law or otherwise attempting to influence the outcome of the US election.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So what does "cooperation" mean? Your definition seems foolishly broad, because using the common definition of cooperation, probably any politician who seeks national office, a governorship, or the like, has "colluded" under your definition.
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I refer you to the Campaign Act of 2002, also known as "McCain-Feingold", which forbids any foreign entity from providing "any thing of value" to a campaign, and
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That does not answer my question. First, because it is already covered by your condition for criminal behavior, violating McCain-Feingold would count as "collusion", so pointing to it cannot answer the question of what "cooperation" is. Secondly, under the normal rules of statutory construction, because the law bans accepting or soliciting the donation or transfer of "money or other thing of value", an exchange of information would not be covered. (Even if the law attempted to cover exchanges of informat
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OK, so you're hung up an issue of terminology. Solicitation of an illegal activity, which is itself illegal, doesn't fit your definition of "collusion", but it's still illegal.
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No, I told you why (a) the actions you described are not illegal under the law you cited, and (b) why your comment didn't clarify your piss-poor definition of "collusion". Perhaps you should get out of that mental rut that you're in.
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Well, we'll see whether your first amendment interpretation stands up, but your understanding of first amendment law conflicts with case law.
Sure you can publish illegally obtained information that's thrown over the transom, but you can't solicit an illegal act, and US news organizations have been successfully convicted despite their right to publish the illegally obtained information.
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I am not relying on the First Amendment to declare the actions that you described as legal. I am relying on the normal rules of statutory interpretation. See, for example, Yates v. United States (2015) [wikipedia.org] for a case where a fish was not a "tangible object" in the context of a particular law, because the context of the words "tangible object" made it clear -- or at least clear enough for the US Supreme Court (including Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor) -- that Congress meant something more specific than "any t
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Nobody is claiming that proprietary information is "tangible".
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No, you were merely implying that information is a "thing of value", when the phrase "thing of value" was in a section of a law called "STRENGTHENING FOREIGN MONEY BAN" [sic], in spite of the facts that information is not a thing, there is no objective way to assess a value for that information, and similar clauses have never (successfully) been applied to exchanges of information.
I hope that makes the situation clear enough to help you understand why your evidence isn't evidence of "collusion" in any usefu
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If you don't understand the meaning of words, why should we expect you to believe any evidence?
As Donald Trump himself famously said,
Believe me, people who believe the words of someone who starts sentences with "believe me" will never believe evidence.
https://youtu.be/rMmiLWDpCno [youtu.be]
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I explained why using the "common definition" of cooperation would make the suggested definition of "collusion" useless. I asked what hey! meant by "cooperation" to allow them to try to rescue their definition of "collusion".
If you can't understand a simple two-sentence comment, maybe you should take Hillary Clinton's advice and Delete your account. [twitter.com]
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You could save us all time on this lovely Saturday if you simply admit that there is no evidence you would ever believe. Not from Slashdot commenters, not from the Mueller investigation and not even from Donald Trump's own mouth. Whether in the comments to a Slashdot article or in a c
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I am not in the habit of admitting things that I know are false. It is not my fault if you mistake rhetoric for actual evidence, and on that basis confirm your previous biases.
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Hillary Clinton's campaign paid foreign agent Christopher Steele [wikipedia.org] to purchase information from Russian agents with the goal of creating a dossier damaging Donald Trump's reputation.
Collusion?
Conspiracy?
FISA warrant abuse?
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Hand waiving.
Private citizens enjoying their freedom of association. But if that's your smoking gun - how much time do you want Hillary and her staffers to serve for not
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So far Russiagaters have provided just as much evidence for their ideas as Chem Trailers have to show the CIA really is putting mind-controlling gas into commercial jet fuel.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The evidence we now have is very substantial but circumstantial.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/... [foreignpolicy.com]
https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com]
Demanding evidence from Slashdot commenters when there is an ongoing - and accelerating - investigation going on by Robert Mueller is pretty disingenuous. By the way, that investigation has already produced arrests and convictions of Trump associates.
You gotta admit, for someone with "no
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The evidence is very circumstantial, that's for sure.
Asking the Russians to not retaliate against new sanctions is "tak[ing] steps to undermine or contradict the administrationâ(TM)s response to Russiaâ(TM)s election interference"? An email explaining how the Obama administration was trying to undermine the incoming Trump administration is supposedly "smoking-gun evidence" of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?
Are you even reading the articles you link to, or just "feeling" them and
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You're full of shit. As someone else pointed out, you post the best you have. The evidence should always be looked at, and if it seems suspect, should be questioned. Why my original post got modded down as flamebait for calling you out for being purposely disingenuous is beyond me. In your next post you double down on being disingenuous.
It's clear you're not here to participate in good faith.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point, any shred of evidence would suffice. It's been a whole year of people talking and talking and no one even showing a shred of evidence.
At least if you provided ANYTHING, it would give us something to actually talk about. At this point, this is just people shouting over each other's head, and the Democrats showing they are sore losers who can't accept their candidate's failing.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
Would meetings by people in the campaign with what they believe to be people working for the Russian Government for purposes of obtaining favors rise to the level of collusion for you?
The definition of collusion is simple :
col . lu . sion
secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.
So for this "meeting" to be collusion, it would require for it to be to "cheat" or "deceive" and have been secret or illegal. Does said meeting meet those requirements ?
Let's look at the other side. Was it in fact deception that even led to this meeting [slashdot.org] ? And did this deception require special steps from an outside influence [thehill.com] ?
Is the fact the meeting took place collusion, or did collusion result in said meeting even taking place under false pretenses ? So what do you think about me thinking about a "simple meeting" being equal to collusion now ?
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Ok. How long do you want Hillary and her staffers to go to prison for paying for the Steele Dossier? Admitted collusion between foreign intelligence agents, with Russian sources, to swing a general election in the United States.
Re: Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Every single one of our intelligence agencies are convinced that the Russians directly influenced our election but you believe it is a lie?
It's funny you quote that, as that was debunked as well :
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/pageoneplus/corrections-june-29-2017.html [nytimes.com]
A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trumpâ(TM)s deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last yearâ(TM)s presidential election. The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies â" the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.
So who should you believe ? Obviously, you've been believing the wrong people.
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That is not much of a correction, though. Those four entities comprise the vast bulk of (the operations and analysis in) the American intelligence community, and are the most involved with questions of Russian influence in US affairs. Do you think the US Coast Guard Intelligence or the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence are going to have particular insights into Russian attempts to influence our elections?
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That is not much of a correction, though. Those four entities comprise the vast bulk of (the operations and analysis in) the American intelligence community, and are the most involved with questions of Russian influence in US affairs. Do you think the US Coast Guard Intelligence or the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence are going to have particular insights into Russian attempts to influence our elections?
If they didn't, why did the Media and Democrats push the narrative of 17 intelligence agencies ? The problem is that the FBI/CIA/NSA's credibility is in the pits. People simply don't believe those agencies are working for the population anymore and thus if a report came out of those 3, it's going to be met with skepticism. This is why the 17 number was pushed at first, and later retracted without much fanfare.
And the GP poster proved their strategy worked, as he is now repeating said 17 number, as if the
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The media pushed the 17 number because they're mostly credulous fools, as Ben Rhodes pointed out. I don't know enough about particular politicians to speculate whether they actually lied or just accepted a number without checking it.
If your beef is with the credibility of the IC, would you have been convinced if the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence signed on? My earlier comment about the other elements of the IC applies also to the question of trust: they're so minor or
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And because Democrats like Hillary Clinton kept repeating it. Like the lie that Saddam planned 911, this one will never go away.
You mean the same sort of people who told lies about Saddam having WMD's and planning 911? At this point, the burden of
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That is not much of a correction, though.
Actually, it's as telling as telling can get. The fact that the initial claim was that all 17 agencies believed rather than the 4, which did, clearly means that whoever made the claim did not read the actual reports. Now who are you going to believe? Politicians who state that reports (which they haven't read) claim that Russia tried to sway US Presidential election or some guy on slashdot? Well, if the reason for not believing the guy on slashdot is that he is misinformed, consider the fact that the po
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So who should you believe ?
Setting up fake accounts on social media and posting bullshit with the intent to influence does not constitute hacking.
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OK, so your standard of proof is an admission of guilt by the Russian government?
Then I'd say by that standard there is not ever going to be any proof.
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This is a good response. Just to be clear, something can be wrong or unpatriotic without being criminal. However your assertion that "collusion" is not a crime isn't correct. Collusion with foreign entities attempting to influence the outcome of US elections is against the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 [wikipedia.org]. There are a number of other federal statutes under which people could be charged, but that law was written specifically to address this kind of thing.
It's still early in the investigation. The w
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Only people as stupid as anti-vaxxers and birthers would say such a thing without evidence. Speaking of stupid, have you thought about this narrative for two seconds? Putin was supposedly crafty to know, years in a advance, that Trump could be elected president of the United States - but dumb enough to collude with someone as dumb as Trump to do so.
Which means the FBI/CIA/NSA would have known as well. Which means President Hilla
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Upping the levels of McCarthyism doesn't not evidence make.
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Shills, shilling about shilling (Score:3)
Russiagate is bullshit. Always has been, always will be. When Russiagaters are confronted with the fact that they are as full of shit as anti-vaxxers, chem trailers and birthers, they engage in petulant hand waving rather than deal with the fact they've bought into a conspiracy so insane you'd have Alex Jones embarrassed to be in the same room as you.
Yes, in a classic case of Swiftboating, everything Hillbots are baselessly accusing Trump of doing, their candidate actually did. Rigged an elec
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He was an agent of USSR. USSR was a Communist dictatorship. It dissolved in 1991. USSR had 300 million people. USSR had media controls as strong as those of North Korea.
Russian Federation is a country of 145 million people. Russian Federation, until recently, was a member of G8. It had open trade policy with the West until Western sanctions started (in response to its annexation of Crimea). It has a mixed economy with strong government stake in natural resources and essentially no oversight in the
Operation Northwoods (Score:2)
Cool story, bro. How would you say that matches up to the CIA plan to place bombs in Miami and blow up planes as a false flag operation to blame on Cuba? Now, since Western Exceptionalists are predictable, whatabboutery is a term you came up with to use whenever it's pointed out that not only does your shit stink, it stinks works.
Don't throw stones in a glass house.