Many Investors In Trump Social Media And Crypto Lost Money

 From Axios.com.

Americans Are Not Convinced TikTok Poses A National Security Risk

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between January 19th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 1,609 adults (including 1,426 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.

Banning TikTok Doesn't Protect Our Security - It Damages Our Free Speech

Our government passed a law that bans TikTok in this country (unless it sells to a U.S. person or company). And last week, the Supreme Court upheld that law - agreeing with Congress that it was a security threat (and that threat was great enough to restrict free speech).

I disagree. I fail to see the security threat. While it is true that the free speech right of all Americans is not absolute - you cannot use speech to put lives in danger (like yelling fire in a theater or telling someone to kill someone or exposing a military secret) - the rules against it are rightfully very limited.

Just how does allowing TikTok to exist compromise our national security?

Its opponents point out that it gathers the personal information of citizens. I'm sure it does. But so do many other social media sites (and they eagerly sell that information to companies and other organizations).  That doesn't compromise our national security, but it can be irritating to individuals who don't want their information shared. To them, I say don't share your information of any internet site.

Its opponents say many people get their "news" from TikTok, and they could be getting news slanted toward China's interests. That may be true also. But many people get their news from other sites that are suspect, both on the right and left (and those sites contain a lot of slanted news and outright misinformation). It would be nice if every site only printed the truth, but that is not the world we live in.

The truth is that free speech must include speech we don't like - even speech that may offend us. We can use our own speech to oppose what we see as offensive or untrue, but it's a mistake to try and ban it. When a government bans one type of speech, it makes it easier to ban another - and banning speech is the tool dictators use to control the population.

The two most important rights we have as Americans are the right to vote and the right to free speech - and those rights depend on each other. We cannot restrict either and maintain our democracy.

The government ban of TikTok was a step in the wrong direction for our democracy. I hope it can soon be overturned.

17% Have Blocked People Because Of Religious Content

The chart above is from the Pew Research Center survey -- done between November 16th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 11,377 adults.

Twitter (And Other Social Media) Need Guardrails

The following is part of a post by Robert Reich about social media needing guardrails. I think he is right.

Now that Elon has total control over one of the major ways Americans find out what’s happening (I know, I know -- Twitter is vapid and filled with smears and jeers, but it has a hugely important role in shaping the news), what can be done to establish guardrails against dangerous lies? It seems likely that Musk will take down the few guardrails that remain on Twitter — but some guardrails are surely needed to prevent malicious harassment or dangerous instigation of violence. Twitter (like Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram) is more like a public utility than a private company. It has public functions and no direct competitors. 

What to do?

Much of the answer boils down to making Twitter (and Facebook and Instagram) more responsible for what users say on its platform – just as any other publisher is responsible. In every other dimension of public life, tort laws allow people who are defamed, harassed, or otherwise injured by malicious or hateful speech to sue. There’s a high bar: plaintiffs must establish that the publisher knew or had reason to know that the published material was false and injurious. But the mere possibility of being sued causes publishers to take at least a modicum of responsibility.

In 1996, Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — shielding website owners from liability by decreeing that they shouldn’t be treated as a “publisher.” But back then Congress could not possibly have foreseen what would happen over the next quarter century: giant firms like Twitter and Facebook making huge amounts of money by posting incendiary content that attracts lots of eyeballs and gives them mountains of user data that they then monetize — even if the content encourages political violence, riots, or gang shootings.

I’ve been talking for some time about the various ways the rich and powerful in our society shield themselves from accountability. I’m well aware of arguments on the other side of this issue (and will share them with you), but I’ve come to the conclusion that Congress should repeal Section 230. Doing so would be one step toward restoring accountability.

Obama Warns Us About The Evil Of Misinformation

The following op-ed is by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC.com: 

On Thursday, former President Barack Obama traveled to Silicon Valley and delivered one of his bluntest critiques yet of tech companies, which he said have fostered discord and disinformation at the expense of democracy.

Tech analysts correctly pointed out that Obama’s speech had its shortcomings — that it was vague on key details about solutions and didn’t advance a novel analysis of the way social media companies operate. But he did make nuanced points about the origins of and scope of the problem.

Most importantly, he used his enormous influence to counsel the public to think proactively about tech not just as consumers, but also as citizens. He eloquently made the case against “fatalistic” despair about technology, and encouraged people to think about how technology can be reshaped to serve, and not undermine, democracy.

Obama's speech, which he delivered at Stanford University, had the potential to be a stream of clichés about how we’re so divided as a society because we’re all glued to our phones and read different news sites. Fortunately, it wasn’t that. He took care to point out that major social media platforms exacerbate pre-existing divisions in our democracy, which emerged and persist for many reasons, including economic displacements from automation and globalization, the nationalist backlash against multiculturalism, dysfunction in our political system, and the ways in which the rise of successful authoritarian regimes such as China have made it easier “to discount democracy’s appeal.”

Looking back on his time in office, the former president said he regretted his “failure to fully appreciate at the time just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories” — and he said he thinks Russian-backed social media disinformation operations in the run-up to the 2016 election exploited divisions that were already pervading domestically. Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, “Putin didn’t do that. He didn’t have to. We did it to ourselves.”

With those qualifications — and with a general acknowledgement of the positive qualities of the tech revolution — Obama argued that the business models of social media platforms have now decisively tilted the experience of the internet toward less understanding and more rage:

Twenty years ago, pillars of web search were comprehensiveness, relevance and speed. But with the rise of social media and the need to better understand people’s online behavior, in order to sell more advertising, companies want to collect more data. More companies optimized for personalization, engagement and speed. And unfortunately, it turns out that inflammatory, polarizing content attracts and engages.

Over the course of his speech, Obama called for democratic oversight of social media companies while protecting free speech rights. He endorsed the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill that would require social media companies to disclose data to independent researchers on how their products work. He also called for the reform of Section 230, a law that protects companies from legal liability for what’s on their platforms. And he argued that there need to be explicit criteria for how to reform social media companies that go beyond discussing profit models:

The way I’m going to evaluate any proposal touching on social media and the internet is whether it strengthens or weakens the prospects for a healthy, inclusive democracy; whether it encourages robust debate and respect for our differences; whether it reinforces rule of law and self-governance; whether it helps us make collective decisions based on the best available information; and whether it recognizes the rights and freedoms and dignity of all our citizens.

As a number of tech experts expressed, Obama’s proposed solutions are vague. For example, it’s unclear how he wants to tweak Section 230. A mandate for tech companies to moderate content couldpotentially restrict free expression in ways that are at odds with the First Amendment, and it could encumber smaller companies far more than bigger ones. And Obama’s guiding principles of creating rules that strengthen healthy democracy are vague enough that companies like Facebook — no virtuous friend of civic health — can claim they’re already upholding some of them. They’re also broad enough to support diametrically opposed views on issues like content moderation. For example, less content moderation might be seen as the best defense for political dissent — a clear measure of the health of democracy; more aggressive moderation might be argued to be the best way to protect against harassment and incitement to violence. Obama presented us with dilemmas, but he did not pierce through them.

But that may be because he, himself, isn’t really clear on the answers. (That’s the case for me as well.) And on balance, Obama pushed the debate in a distinctly positive direction by encouraging people to shake off a sense of “grimness” regarding social media. Leaning into his signature optimism, he encouraged the public to think of technology as a tool, not just the way the world is.

“The handwritten sign was a tool. TV’s a tool. The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool,” he said. “At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them, and we can remake them.”

“It’s up to each of us to decide what we value and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values,” he continued. “And I believe we should use every tool at our disposal to secure our greatest gift: a government of, by, for the people, for generations to come.” That's a paradigm I can get behind.

Trump Social Media Is Crazy And A Failure

 The following op-ed is by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post:

There is almost nothing I wouldn’t do for you, dear reader, and this week, in your behalf, I made a painful sacrifice: I joined Truth Social so you don’t have to.

I endured weeks on the waiting list for the Donald Trump-created, Devin Nunes-run attempt at a Twitter killer, and I suffered through a series of technical glitches. But eventually I gained access. As a result, I have come to be in possession of the following new pieces of information about the war in Ukraine:

Hunter Biden is involved in building and running biolabs in the country.

The CIA and National Institutes of Health are both “deeply involved” in the Ukrainian biolabs.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was set in motion by a CIA false-flag operation that was funded by George Soros.

The covid-19 pathogen originated not in China but in Shpyl’chyna, a village in Ukraine.

The bioweapons developed in Ukraine specifically target the “Abrahamic Bloodline.”

Neo-Nazis from Ukraine joined with the FBI to infiltrate the Capitol on Jan. 6 and participated in the insurrection.

Ukraine was planning to use drones to attack Russia with pathogens from the U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.

President Biden has been using Ukraine to launder money.

Ukrainian neo-Nazis controlled the Ukrainian city of Mariupol before Russians invaded.

Russia’s alleged war crimes were staged.

I also found many posts calling President Biden a pedophile (or a “groomer” in the new parlance of QAnon). I found badly photoshopped images of Vice President Harris in sexualized situations. I found ceaseless attacks on trans people, an edited video of a cat attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attacks on Disney for opposing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, references to satanic sacrifice by the “deep state,” a few racist epithets and endless accusations about Hunter Biden’s laptop and drug abuse.

I signed up for Truth Social, which launched its attack on Twitter soon after Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine, on March 3. “Due to high demand,” my “waitlist number” was 986,565.

I promptly forgot about Truth Social. Apparently, so did everybody else. The Wrap, an entertainment news website, reported this week that the app has seen a 93 percent drop in sign-ups (weekly installs on the Apple App Store have fallen from 872,000 at launch to just 60,000, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower) and a “similarly steep decline in traffic.” Truth Social had almost 1 million daily visits at launch, but that has fallen to fewer than 300,000 — well below Gab, a social media site that attracts white supremacists, according to SimilarWeb, another analytics firm.

Seems Trump’s social media venture is headed the way of Trump University, Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, Trump’s charities, Trump mattresses, Trump steaks, Trump clothing, Trump perfume, Trump lighting, Trump floor coverings, Trump eyewear, the Trump presidency and American democracy.

But this week, I got the coveted email welcoming me to Truth Social, with the caveat that “we are still fixing many bugs.” Sure enough, I clicked on the provided link to my profile — and got an error message. Eventually, I followed all the accounts Truth suggested for me, including Kyle Rittenhouse, Maria Bartiromo, the Epoch Times, Hot Chicks Golfing, Dr. Fauci Sucks, Sean Hannity, Eric Trump, Fake Hunter Biden, Dan Bongino, Breitbart News, Donald Trump Jr. and Donald Trump. House Republican leaders are on the platform, with red checkmarks instead of Twitter’s blue. In fact, the whole thing looks similar to Twitter, with “Truths” instead of tweets; the only differences are the lack of functionality and users.

I searched for the hashtag #Ukraine, hopped into the rabbit hole and was quickly swimming in a cesspool.

There were posts from Russian state propaganda. There was a doctored image of Trump holding a sign saying “Zelensky is the Avenatti of leaders.” There was a doctored video of Putin saying “Let’s go, Brandon.” There were posts about Ukrainian leaders being corrupt. There was a claim that Ukraine is “defending the NWO” — New World Order.

I scrolled on: Ukrainian soldiers are “white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” the “globalists” are backing Ukraine, the United States has “no business in this fraternal conflict,” a U.S. undersecretary of state paid $5 million to elect Volodymyr Zelensky, sanctions on Russia are hurting the U.S. dollar, Ukraine attacked Russia. Oh, and the Democrats (“Demon Rats”) “did not want Trump to know that they were creating a CIA colony in Ukraine,” so “they paralyzed his administration with two fake ‘impeachment’s and ultimately stole the election.”

Busted!

I did find the occasional pro-Ukraine “Truth.” And — who knows? — if I searched long enough, I might have found something accurate. But I didn’t. Instead, I found a small clump of angry people shouting into a void. And that’s the sad truth.

Trump's Social Media Site Is Just A Crude Rip-Off Of Twitter

Trump's new social media platform has not officially started, but there is a test version of it on the internet. MSNBC's Zeeshan Aleem visited the site. Here's what he had to say about it: 

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced the launch of a media company and a social media platform designed, in his words, to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.” And so far the platform, called Truth Social (of course!), has been as true to form as one could’ve imagined: a ramshackle, derivative project that expresses Trump’s desperate thirst for power and profit.

The janky and rushed nature of Truth Social was immediately apparent. While in his announcement Trump said a beta version is meant to be available to invited guests in November and a national rollout is expected in early 2022, pranksters and curious journalists found what appeared to be an unreleased test version of the site within hours and proceeded to flood it.

Immediately people snatched up VIP handles like “donaldtrump” and “mikepence.” The person who grabbed “donaldjtrump” swiftly pinned a photo of a pig defecating on their profile. That site has been pulled offline, but at least one other test version has been circulating, as well, suggesting striking technical vulnerabilities.

As Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell notes in his analysis, the website is a crude, uncreative knockoff of Trump’s favorite social media platform — and it is also somehow already violating licensing codes:

"The site looks almost entirely like a Twitter clone: A user can post Truths, which are like tweets, or Re-Truths, which are retweets. There’s also a news feed, called the Truth Feed, a notification system so users can know “who’s interacting with your TRUTH’s,” the social network’s App Store profile states.

The site’s code shows it runs a mostly unmodified version of Mastodon, the free, open-source software launched in 2016 that anyone can use to run a self-made social networking site.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told The Post Thursday that Trump’s site may violate Mastodon’s licensing rules, which require developers to share any modifications and link to the original source code. Rochko said he has contacted the company’s legal counsel to make a determination."

Using a link to what appeared to be another test site that hasn’t been taken down, I was easily able to create a profile. Given its extreme similarity to Twitter (although with a strikingly drab color scheme) it wasn't hard to navigate. But when you publish posts you don't hit "Tweet" — you hit a button that says “TRUTH!”

In addition to the vapid design, it was easy to sense the next step in Trump’s project to lay waste to the idea of shared reality. Every post from every user is a “Truth,” not because of the substance of what someone is saying, but by virtue of where they are saying it: Trump’s social media space. This principle is key to Trump's authoritarian paradigm, in which truth is not tethered to reality or reason, but instead to the will to power and tribalism — something is true because my tribe and I want it to be true.

The site's technical woes and uninspired design might not deter new users, because Trump isn't trying to win over the market by creating a unique experience. Instead he's looking to create a unique ideological space. Trump’s media group claims it wants to create a “non-cancellable global community,” by which it means a social media platform that is populated solely by people on the right, and establishes little to no regulation surrounding abuse, disinformation, calls to violence and bigotry.

The crux of the matter, however, is to create a forum where Trumphas free rein to speak as he wishes to and be adulated for it. "We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced," he wrote in his announcement. "This is unacceptable."

Trump’s new media venture ticks all the classic Trump boxes: money, power, ego. If it's successful, it could be an asset in keeping his potential 2024 aspirations alive. But whether his base finds the site to be a tolerable experience remains an open question.

Nearly Half Of Public Gets COVID Info From Social Media

The chart above is from a survey done by the Pew Research Center. Their survey was done between July 26th and August 8th of a national sample of 11,178 adults, with a 1.4 point margin of error. 

It shows that nearly half of Americans say they've been getting information about COVID-19 and the vaccines from social media. I find that depressing, but it explains why so many people are misinformed.

I love social media (as my Facebook friends can tell you). But it is not a good place to get news -- about COVID and vaccines or anything else. It's a great place to stay in contact with friends and associates, but much of the "news" there is little more than propaganda -- or outright misinformation.

Americans are lucky in that they have many places to get real news. There are newspapers, TV, radio, and magazines that all dedicate themselves to reporting the truth. Use those sources for getting news, and use the social media for entertainment.

Social Media Interactions About Trump Show A Radical Drop

 From Axios.com:

Social media interactions about former President Trump have fallen 91% since January, according to exclusive data from NewsWhip.

When Trump lost his social media accounts, he lost his once-immense power to put himself at the center of Americans' attention.

 Clicks to Trump stories fell 81% from January to February, another 56% from February to March and 40% from March to April, according to exclusive data from SocialFlow.

Trump Wants To Create His Own Social Media Platform

While in office, Donald Trump told over 30,000 lies. Many, if not most, of those lies were spread on social media -- with Twitter being his favorite way to lie to the American people. Because of all those lies (and some of them being dangerous lies), Trump has been banned now from using most social media platforms.

That is killing him, because he can no longer bathe in the glory afforded him by his supporters as he lied to them. He has become an afterthought for most Americans, and his narcissism is suffering.

So, he now wants to start his own social media platform -- a place for him to lie and his supporters to listen and pass on the misinformation. Could such a thing actually succeed? Or would it just be another Trump business failure?

Paul Waldman, in The Washington Post, feels it would be the latter. Here is much of what he wrote about Trump's new business venture:

It’s of course possible that Trumpbook, or Trmpr, or whatever it might be called, will turn out to be as much a figment of the imagination as the spectacular health-care plan Trump kept promising as president. But let’s assume for the moment that this actually comes to pass.

I for one look forward to watching it fail miserably.

Is that just petty schadenfreude? Sure. But after all he put us through, I think we deserve to periodically remind ourselves for the next few years that Trump is a loser and nobody knows it more than he does.

But if he actually thinks a personality-driven, ideologically limited social network can succeed, he understands a lot less about contemporary media than we thought.

For years, we heard that Trump might try to form his own media company, a cable network that would be everything Fox News is, but Trumpier. It never happened, probably because as soon as he started to consider what would be involved, he realized it was just too daunting a challenge.

It would certainly be simpler to start a social media platform, but it’s not something he has any experience in. For him to succeed in a new line of commerce he’d never been involved in before, he’d have to bring around him some smart, competent people who knew a lot about the technical and business aspects of this endeavor.

And his track record on hiring leaves something to be desired. His White House was without doubt the most incompetent in modern times: It leaked like a sieve, it could barely issue a news release that wasn’t full of typos, and he went through four chiefs of staff and seven communications directors.

So who’s going to create and run Trmpr? Jared Kushner? Good luck with that.

Next you have this problem: As much as Trump might revel in the adulation of his fans, what he has always craved most is the attention and acknowledgment of the broader public (and the elites, whom he derides while simultaneously seeking their acceptance).

That’s why Twitter worked so well for him: Because it’s the place where journalists congregate (along with a few hundred million other people), he could leverage it to achieve much wider attention than simply speaking to the like-minded people who followed him there.

But a platform solely populated by his supporters will probably suffer the same problem sites such as Parler had: With only conservatives in attendance, even those who went there enthusiastically at the beginning didn’t find it all that compelling. If you own the libs on your social media site but no libs are there to hear it, have the libs actually been owned?

I’d also question whether even Trump’s supporters feel like they desperately need to hear more from him. He pops up from time to time on Fox News, and now that they’ve detoxified from the daily Trumpian deluge, they might find that they don’t really need to get his thoughts on a minute-to-minute basis.

There are still lots of conservative media outlets Trump loyalists can get their news from, and if they want to talk to each other, Facebook is still the same sewer of right-wing misinformation they know and love.

But you can see why Trump would be batting about an idea like this one. His business is suffering, and he’s besieged by lawsuits and investigations. His brand is forever tarnished — if you were a developer in Panama or Malaysia, would you want to pay him millions of dollars for the rights to slap the Trump name on your hotel? He’s going to need every income stream he can get.

So maybe his ambitions are modest. Rather than starting a platform that will succeed so spectacularly it will drive Twitter out of business and restore Trump to gold-plated glory, he may just want to grab whatever he can get while he can. A bottom-feeding operation meant to squeeze as much money as possible from his most gullible supporters would be completely in character.

He can put it alongside Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, the Tour de Trump, and all the other genius ideas that he milked for a few bucks before they crashed and burned. It’s no consolation for the real damage he did in lives, suffering and the debasement of our nation’s politics, but at least we’ll have another reason to laugh at him a little.

GOP Bows To Trump - But Patriot Party Sentiment Growing

In an effort to retain control of the Republican Party, Donald Trump tossed out the idea of starting his own political party -- the Patriot Party.

Elected GOP officials, afraid of losing their jobs if the Republican vote was splintered because of that new party, immediately fell in line and bowed to Trump's wishes. These political cowards cared more about their own jobs than the reputation and future of their party.

But their efforts may be in vain. There is evidence that the idea of a new Patriot Party is growing among Trump supporters.

Consider this from Reuters.com:

Far-right backers of Donald Trump are drumming up support on social media for the idea of a “Patriot Party,” using references to militia groups and promoting a mix of conspiracy theories, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The online campaign for a proposed alternative to the Republican Party has heavily promoted “Stop the Steal” events throughout the country, including the violent siege of Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, pushing the false claim that the former U.S. President lost November’s election due to widespread fraud. 

Amid a rift with several Republican leaders over the Capitol riot, Trump has talked about forming a new political party, his advisers say.

However, Trump’s “Save America PAC” action committee says he has set aside the idea for now.

On Facebook, the effort appears to be decentralized but growing rapidly, with some “Patriot Party” groups gaining thousands of members in a matter of days, according to the research conducted by watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project. . . .

TTP said it found 51 groups and 85 pages on Facebook promoting Patriot Party iconography to tens of thousands of followers in a count it conducted on Jan. 20, more than half created since the Nov. 3 election.

Facebook has removed some of the accounts, including a group created Jan. 17 that gained 105,000 members over the eight days it existed, but enforcement has been “piecemeal” and dozens of others remain active on the platform, TTP said. . . .

Support for the Patriot Party movement has also flourished on other social media platforms and online news sites, peaking around Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, according to data from media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

Americans Are Opposed To Political Ads On Social Media

 

The charts above are from the Pew Research Center. They questioned 10,093 respondents between September 8th and 13th, and their survey has a 1.6 point margin of error.

It shows that a clear majority of Americans don't want political ads on their social media sites. In fact, only 26% believes those sites should run political ads while 54% believe they should not. And that extends across all age groups, party labels, and political ideologies.

They also don't like those social media sites using their data and online activity to target them for political ads.

Biden Has Far More Internet "Hits" Than Other Candidates

The chart above is from Axios.com. It shows the social media internet actions generated for each of the Democratic candidates. Joe Biden is the recipient of more internet actions that any other candidate -- 2.2 million more than Elizabeth Warren and 2.3 million more than Bernie Sanders. Those were the only three candidate getting more than a million internet actions.

Methodology: This project measures the number of social media interactions generated on stories published about the 2020 candidates and issues. 

• Interactions are calculated from reactions, comments and shares on those stories on Facebook as well as the number of shares from more than 300,000 influential Twitter accounts and retweets and likes on those posts.
• Tracked published stories come from a defined universe of more than 450,000 domains.

Russia Has Used Social Media To Attack Robert Mueller

Robert Mueller is an American HERO. He has served the United States for most of his adult life. It started when he served in the Marines in Vietnam (winning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart). Then he served in various positions in the Justice Department, and as Director of the FBI. He has been appointed to Senate-confirmed government positions by four presidents (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama).

Currently, he is serving as Special Counsel investigating collusion and other crimes committed by Donald Trump and his family, friends, and aides. I have no doubt that whatever conclusion he reaches in that investigation, it will be fair and totally truthful.

He has already gotten many indictments, and convictions of people close to Trump (his attorney, his NSA advisor, his campaign manager, etc.). And evidently Trump is scared of the investigation, because he (and his followers) have relentlessly attacked Mueller. They are not alone though.

Russia used social media (and groups like the NRA to funnel money) to help get Trump elected in 2016. Now, in an effort to protect their investment, Russia has continued to use social media -- this time to produce many attacks on and lies about Robert Mueller. Here is just part of a Washington Post article on this Russian disinformation campaign:

Months after President Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sights on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there.

The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram — which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal — claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups.”

Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters. The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday. . . .

The emergence of Mueller as a significant target also highlights the adaptability of the Russian campaign. He was appointed in May 2017 as special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian influence on the Trump campaign. In that role, he has indicted on criminal charges a Kremlin-linked troll farm called the Internet Research Agency and others affiliated with the disinformation campaign.

A Clemson University research team, not affiliated with either of the reports released Monday, found that the Russians tweeted about Mueller more than 5,000 times, including retweets first posted by others. Some called for his firing, while others mocked him as incompetent and still others campaigned for the end of his “entire fake investigation.”

The report by New Knowledge highlighted the focus on Mueller and fired FBI director James B. Comey, who was falsely portrayed as “a dirty cop.”

New Study Shows "Fake News" Tipped Election To Trump

(Cartoon image is by David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times.)

Donald Trump has been loathe to admit that Russian interference had any effect on the 2016 presidential election. He is afraid that a close look at the Russian meddling in that election will show that their actions did help him to win (whether he colluded with them to accomplish that or not) -- and that would make him look undeserving of the office (since he got it with foreign help).

It turns out that his fears are well-grounded. While there's still no evidence that the Russian hacking was able to alter any votes, a new study shows that Russian trolls were effective in planting "fake news" on social media which depressed the vote for Clinton (maybe as much as 4% overall) -- and that was enough to deny her an electoral college victory.

Most of these fake stories were planted on social media by Russian "trolls". They were then picked up and redistributed widely by both Trump supporters on the right and Sanders supporters on the left. Most of those passing on the fake stories probably thought they were true, and were just trying to help their own candidate -- but that doesn't excuse their being duped by Russian trolls.

The new study was done by Richard Gunther, Paul A. Beck, and Erik C. Nesbit at Ohio State University. The whole study is well worth reading, but I provide just a tiny part of it below.

Majority Thinks The Russians Affected 2016 Election Result

We've known for a while that Russian trolls spread misinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now we learn that Facebook actually sold ads to Russians trying to affect the election in favor of Donald Trump. The question, of course, is did that Russian use of social media actually affect the outcome of the presidential election?

A majority of Americans (54%) think it did affect the outcome, while only 43% don't believe that -- a difference of 11 points. Women (by 18 points), under 45's (by 16 points), over 45's (by 6 points), Nonwhites (by 42 points), those making less than $50k (by 23 points), Democrats (by 66 points), and Independents (by 13 points) agree that Russian use of social media did affect the election outcome.

Men (by 7 points), Whites (by 6 points), those making over $50k (by 1 point), and Republicans (by 67 points) don't believe the Russians affected the outcome of the election.

The chart reflects the results of a new CNN News / SSRS Poll -- done between September 17th and 20th of a random national sample of 1,053 adults, with a 3.7 point margin of error.

Mueller's "Collusion" Investigation Widens To Include Pro-Trump Websites And Social Media

(Trump photo is from Blasting News.)

Here is part of an article on the collusion investigation of Donald Trump. It was written by Julian Borger for The Guardian.

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or paedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

Warner said there was evidence that this campaign appeared to be focused on key voters in swing states, raising the question over whether there was coordination with US political operatives in directing the flow of bogus stories.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to oversee the investigation into the Russian role in the election, is thought to be looking into all these issues, as well as possible links between Russian fake news factories and far-right sites in the US.

It is a wide-ranging investigation that is examining the unusually large number of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign, as well as the possibility that the Kremlin has personal or financial leverage over members in the Trump camp, including the president himself according to his own remarks on Twitter.

The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.

A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.

Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.

Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.

Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.

“This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,” Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject.

“What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?”

Mattes believes that the aim of the campaign was to damage Clinton, who Vladimir Putin saw as his arch foe, and then, after the primaries were over, to minimise the number of Sanders voters who switched their support to Clinton in the face-off against Trump.

Fake News Is Not A Joke - It Is Dangerous

The picture above (by Sarah L Voisin/Washington Post) shows the police response to a report of a shooter in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Police said 28 year old Edgar Maddison Welch had traveled fro North Carolina to the Comet Ping Pong Restaurant in Washington to "investigate" the business and expose the nefarious things that were happening there. He entered the restaurant and fired several shots into the ceiling, forcing patrons and employees to flee.

Why would he do such an insane thing? Because of fake news stories posted on social media site shortly before the election. Here's how The Washington Post describes it:

The restaurant’s owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s backrooms. Even Michael Flynn, a retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia. None of them were true. But the fake stories and threats persisted, some even aimed at children of Comet Ping Pong employees and patrons. The restaurant’s owner was forced to contact the FBI, local police, Facebook and other social-media platforms in an effort to remove the articles. . . .

But it didn’t stop the harassment, and nearby businesses have received threats as well, according to police. On Sunday, Washington Post reporters involved in this article were the target of online threats shortly after it posted.

It's a miracle that no one was physically harmed, but financial and psychological damage was done to businesses in the area and their employees (and some customers as well) -- and all because some people thought it was humorous (or an aid to Donald Trump) to post fake news stories on the internet.

There is no excuse for the posting of fake news stories. We have long known, that out of our huge population, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people that will believe nearly anything (especially if it coincides with what they want to believe, or is about some person or groups that they don't like). And there are too many of them who are willing to grab a weapon and act on that fake news by killing innocent people. And it doesn't seem to make any difference how crazy the story is -- there will be some who believe it and are willing to kill because of it.

Fake news stories are not harmless or funny -- or acceptable as a campaign tool. They are dangerous, and they must be stopped.