AP: Cyborgs, Trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation

Sofa King Smoooth said:

By the way, no offense to you. I normally do not get into these type of conversations. Appreciate your views and spirited debate.

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Fogdog said:

Are you kidding? No offense taken. I didn't even know I might have even thought I might have been offended.

A couple of weeks ago, our president assumed the powers of a king, our Republican Senators backed him up and right wingers on this site claimed I was making up lies when I cited facts.

Nah, Al Jazeera vs New York Times, that's a discussion that we can have.

Any time.

No problem

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hanimmal said:

I am not as fond of the NY Times as the Washington Post due to it seemingly is the place that Dear Leader has his minions selectively leak to when he wants something blasted across the actual news airwaves, and they do it for him a lot.

Also the nonsense with the "Uranium-1":

But they do have fantastic articles in it and great investigative videos. Nobody is perfect I guess.

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Fogdog said:

I just mentioned NYT. Washington Post is my go-to and I don't subscribe to NYT so can't read their stuff any more, although when I did have access, found it to be good. I subscribe to Financial Times, based in London and find it to be good. It used to be better, but still I like access to news-based reporting and opinion from the center-left or center-right. Al Jazeerah is OK, though. It's a good second source for me to use and I do.

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hanimmal said:

I used to get the economist, but let my subscription lapse a while back. I only got the WAPO because I got sick of running into paywalls when looking up stuff being said in this forum and really don't trust most of the blog websites that try to pass off as journalism.

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Rottedroots said:

Trolls get paid? Is that a fact and who pays them? I've been a posting member here longer than you srh88, DIY-led, and dear UncleBuck and almost as long as Hannimal so I certainly didnt float over from another site srh88 because my handlers made contact with a sleeper troll and gave me my instructions.

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1. Hack the Vote
When officials arrived at work on the morning of May 22, 2014, three days before a presidential election, they discovered that their hard drives were fried. Hours earlier, pro-Kremlin hackers had taken a digital sledgehammer to a vital piece of Ukraine’s democratic infrastructure, the network that collects vote tallies from across the nation. After finishing the task, they taunted their victim, posting photos of an election commissioner’s renovated bathroom and his wife’s passport.

Relying on a backup system, the Ukrainians were able to resuscitate their network. But on election night the attacks persisted. Hackers sent Russian journalists a link to a chart they had implanted on the official website of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission. The graphic purported to show that a right-wing nationalist had sprinted to the lead in the presidential race. Although the public couldn’t access the chart, Russian state television flashed the forged results on its highly watched newscast.

If the attack on Ukraine represented something like all-out digital war, Russia’s hacking of the United States’ electoral system two years later was more like a burglar going house to house jangling doorknobs. The Russians had the capacity to cause far greater damage than they did—at the very least to render Election Day a chaotic mess—but didn’t act on it, because they deemed such an operation either unnecessary or not worth the cost.

The U.S. intelligence community has admitted that it’s not entirely sure why Russia sat on its hands. One theory holds that Barack Obama forced Russian restraint when he pulled Vladimir Putin aside at the end of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, on September 5, 2016. With only interpreters present, Obama delivered a carefully worded admonition not to mess with the integrity of the election. By design, he didn’t elaborate any specific consequence for ignoring his warning.

Perhaps the warning was heeded. The GRU kept on probing voting systems through the month of October, however, and there are other, more ominous explanations for Russia’s apparent restraint. Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator on Obama’s National Security Council, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Russians were, in essence, casing the joint. They were gathering intelligence about the digital networks that undergird American elections and putting together a map so that they “could come back later and actually execute an operation.”

What sort of operation could Russia execute in 2020? Unlike Ukraine, the United States doesn’t have a central node that, if struck, could disable democracy at its core. Instead, the United States has an array of smaller but still alluring targets: the vendors, niche companies, that sell voting equipment to states and localities; the employees of those governments, each with passwords that can be stolen; voting machines that connect to the internet to transmit election results.

Matt Masterson is a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s freshly minted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a bureau assigned to help states protect elections from outside attack; it’s where Jack Cable will work this summer. I asked Masterson to describe the scenarios that keep him up at night. His greatest fear is that an election official might inadvertently enable a piece of ransomware. These are malicious bits of code that encrypt data and files, essentially placing a lock on a system; money is then demanded in exchange for the key. In 2017, Ukraine was targeted again, this time with a similar piece of malware called NotPetya. But instead of extorting Ukraine, Russia sought to cripple it. NotPetya wiped 10 percent of the nation’s computers; it disabled ATMs, telephone networks, and banks. (The United States is well aware of NotPetya’s potency, because it relied on a tool created by—and stolen from—the National Security Agency.) If the Russians attached such a bug to a voter-registration database, they could render an entire election logistically unfeasible; tracking who had voted and where they’d voted would be impossible.

But Russia need not risk such a devastating attack. It can simply meddle with voter-registration databases, which are filled with vulnerabilities similar to the ones that Cable exposed. Such meddling could stop short of purging voters from the rolls and still cause significant disruptions: Hackers could flip the digits in addresses, so that voters’ photo IDs no longer match the official records. When people arrived at the polls, they would likely still be able to vote, but might be forced to cast provisional ballots. The confusion and additional paperwork would generate long lines and stoke suspicion about the underlying integrity of the election.

Given the fragility of American democracy, even the tiniest interference, or hint of interference, could undermine faith in the tally of the vote. On Election Night, the Russians could place a page on the Wisconsin Elections Commission website that falsely showed Trump with a sizable lead. Government officials would be forced to declare it a hoax. Imagine how Twitter demagogues, the president among them, would exploit the ensuing confusion.

Such scenarios ought to have sparked a clamor for systemic reform. But in the past, when the federal government has pointed out these vulnerabilities—and attempted to protect against them—the states have chafed and moaned. In August 2016, President Obama’s homeland-security secretary, Jeh Johnson, held a conference call with state election officials and informed them of the need to safeguard their infrastructure. Instead of accepting his offer of help, they told him, “This is our responsibility and there should not be a federal takeover of the election system.”

After the 2016 election, the federal government could have taken a stronger hand with localities. Unprecedented acts of foreign interference presumably would have provided quite a bit of leverage. That did not happen. The president perceives any suggestion of Russian interference as the diminution of his own legitimacy. This has contributed to a conspiracy of silence about the events of 2016. A year after the election, the Department of Homeland Security told 21 states that Russia had attempted to hack their electoral systems. Two years later, a Senate report publicly disclosed that Russia had, in fact, targeted all 50 states. When then–DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tried to raise the subject of electoral security with the president, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney reportedly told her to steer clear of it. According to The New York Times, Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”

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hanimmal said:

Long but well worth the read.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/
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I really hope Putin realizes his country will be far better off by backing off their attack on our (and every other countries) democracy. We have enough to deal with Trump using their playbook of lying and use of racist/radicalizing propaganda and the Republicans actively suppressing votes.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

A summary by the author, more might watch than read.
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Why The 2016 Election Was Just A 'Dry Run' For Russia | Morning Joe | MSNBC

The Atlantic's Franklin Foer joins Morning Joe to discuss his new piece 'Putin Is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election.' Aired on 05/13/2020.

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hanimmal said:

The Atlantic has a very good article on disinformation and how Trump used it to get elected, and how he found it is being used today to trap people in a information bubble that is constant.

Must read article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
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It really shows that if you are ruthless and are willing to lie unabashedly, technology today makes it very easy to spread that message in a very real way, add to it the power of the Presidency (and foreign nations militaries) and it is scary effective.

I really want to post the entire article, but it is crazy long, because it is covering so much really important information. From Trump's #1 Domestic Propaganda Troll Brad Parscale's complete lack of shame in his pushing of lies, to the very real problem of should the Democrats start just fighting fire with fire and just go 1984 along with the Republicans and just create their own narratives instead of trying to keep to reality and facts.

But this portion really deserves to be in this thread as it gets into some of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story and how the above post is so scary that our government is not doing anything to stop it:
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Fogdog said:

morning joe is a propaganda site that supports the left wing agenda. Anything coming from that source is suspect.

It doesn't matter that I agree Trump is a crappy prez and that Russia floods social media with right wing propaganda. All propaganda is bad. Stop flooding this site with fake news, faux science and propaganda.

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schuylaar said:

i disagree and leave him alone.

i enjoy his posts and if you don't like, don't read it..there's always ignore.

it's STILL a free country.

your shit is off the chain most days.

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Fogdog said:

I posted a valid criticism. That idiot has no filter and just posts whatever sciency crap he runs across.

I'll remind you that Trump tried to use fake hope of miracle cures to distract people whe the very real disaster he was causing in March drew criticism from actual medical scientists. HCQ, for example. That DIY ditz just flooded this site with fake science and that's when we parted ways.

I'm not saying he's a right wing troll, just a dunce. Directly asking him to stop posting that crap is not only my right but the right thing to do.

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schuylaar said:

everyone is entitled to their opinion..even the 'sciency crap'. science/facts/data are what will get us out of this..fake science? where?

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Fogdog said:

morning joe is a propaganda site that supports the left wing agenda. Anything coming from that source is suspect.

It doesn't matter that I agree Trump is a crappy prez and that Russia floods social media with right wing propaganda. All propaganda is bad. Stop flooding this site with fake news, faux science and propaganda.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

It was an interview with the author of the article. You have a stray hair up your ass and I'll post what I like. Calling these moderate democrats and former republicans left wing propaganda is stupid and contrary to the facts. My post was relevant to the conversation yours is just an attack for personal reasons

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Now Trump and his right wing media propaganda allies are running an attack and harassment campaign against Dr. Fauci. He is also ordering the CDC to lower the death rates by screwing with how they are reported. I imagine some red states will try to under report fatalities to keep him happy, this is getting pathetic.

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