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posted by mrpg on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-web-is-misinformation dept.

According to The Daily Beast, Jenna Abrams was not a real person at all, but was part of a Russian plot to turn Americans against themselves:

Her opinions about everything from manspreading on the subway to Rachel Dolezal to ballistic missiles still linger on news sites all over the web.

[...] Her account was the creation of employees at the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian government-funded "troll farm," in St. Petersburg.

[...] Abrams' pervasiveness in American news outlets shows just how much impact Russia's troll farm had on American discourse in the run-up to the 2016 election—and illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.

While the the [sic] typical image of a Russian troll may be a hastily put together Twitter account blaring out non-stop political messages, Abrams' account went to great lengths to simulate a real, American person who existed outside of Twitter fights and amplifying racist disinformation.

Her Twitter account was created back in 2014. She had a personal website, a Medium page, her own Gmail, and even a GoFundMe page.

takyon: More Russia stuff follows:

SAN FRANCISCO — As many as 126 million people — or one-third the U.S. population — may have seen material posted by a Russian troll farm under fake Facebook identities between 2015 and 2017, according to planned testimony by Facebook's general counsel obtained by USA TODAY.

Source: USA Today

The weekend after Trump's election, thousands of people attended a left-wing anti-Trump protest in New York City that was secretly organized by Russian operatives, ads released by the House Intelligence Committee revealed.

More than 16,000 people RSVP'd on Facebook for the protest, which was titled: "Trump is NOT my President. March against Trump."

Also at Politico.

Finally, Facebook will require political advertisers to disclose their identities.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @12:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @12:19PM (#593001)

    Wow, just wow ... Russia gained total ideological superiority in your own info space.

    Now the big picture is revealed it is obvious that they didn't start when presidential campaign started. You are only discovering it now, when they breached the noise threshold and became visible. These have to be the fruits of a long term labor, probably starting back in 60's and 70's, long before there even was an ubiquitous WWW. There maybe had been a short pause in continuous division digging through the 1990s, but they managed to put you where they want it: at nearly perfect very adversarial half-split.

    They played a long shot, like Mongolian hordes they crossed the desert behind your back, they corrupted you unseen, and now you are deadlocked all by yourselves.
    It is too late now. You can chase them out and censor them to keep them out, but the damage is already done, and you don't even realize that some of your dearest ideas are not originally yours at all.

    You need to sit back and think very hard, to think the way your adversary thinks, to see how and why they succeeded as much, how they pushed certain narratives, and how and why you made possible that there have been risen a class of opportunists who gained from furthering them without even suspecting what is going on behind. "Useful idiots", only smart ones.

    Today American society is not just divided, but fragmented, balkanized and for the great part self-loathing. There is neither fast nor easy path to healing. You will need an herculean amount of good will (yes, I know, Heracles was not famous for his good will, "herculean" is about the "amount") to become functional society again, or for the first time. If you don't, eventually you will have a territorial split and another bloody civil war raging, military siding with faction most likable by top brass, former allies supporting another, in worst case, and adversaries supporting always the side which has the lower hand at the moment. Once the gunpowder smoke clears out, there'll be several new nations in the ruins. If you've seen one empire collapse, you've seen them all.

    All that can be prevented if all sides just ease the power struggle and adopt an overall more tolerant and cooperative stance.

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