Testimony from social media giants to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Twitter censored #PodestaEmails tweets and had strange criteria for defining “Russians,” while Google is now backing a think tank close to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Legal representatives for Facebook, Google and Twitter testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday, as part of the ongoing Congressional investigations into Russia’s alleged efforts to influence the 2016 US election.  

Prepared remarks revealed Twitter’s censorship of the hashtags #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeaks, along with criteria for identifying Russian accounts that are questionable to say the least.

Also revealed was Google’s close relationship with politicians and governments and increased support for Defending Digital Democracy, a Harvard-based project staffed by former Pentagon and NSA officials, along with Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager and the CEO of Crowdstrike, a Democratic National Committee contractor behind the accusation that Russia hacked the DNC emails.

Twitter Censored #PodestaEmails

In written testimony, Twitter Acting General Counsel Sean J. Edgett revealed the company worked to stop the hashtag #PodestaEmails being seen by users.

Edgett said many tweets featuring the hashtag were “automated” and said Twitter’s spam detection systems dampened the impact of tweets containing the hashtag.

#Podesta files: Top 10 revelations from leaked #Clinton campaign e-mailshttps://t.co/hQlKGEVHjk#email#leakspic.twitter.com/D3Xvgcsf5G

— RT (@RT_com) October 13, 2016

The “core of the hashtag was propagated by WikiLeaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website,” Edgett’s testimony said.

WikiLeaks released the Podesta emails in daily batches in the month leading up to election day on November 6, 2016, meaning it would have tweeted about the releases about four times a day, on average, based on the 118 figure. Twitter said 57,000 of its users posted 426,000 tweets with some form of that hashtag.

“Approximately one quarter (25 percent) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said.

New DNC email leak reveals anti-Sanders bias, pro-Clinton collusion among top officialshttps://t.co/mdE0AK7Qr9pic.twitter.com/KzaC6RXGR8

— RT America (@RT_America) July 22, 2016

Twitter also said it “hid” 48 percent of tweets using variants of #DNCLeaks, which referred to the leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee in July 2016. These leaks revealed the DNC’s efforts to push Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate during the primaries and resulted in the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz right before the party’s convention.

Less than 4 percent of #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeaks tweets came from potential Russian-linked accounts, Twitter said.

Weeding out ‘Russians’

Twitter also detailed its approach to detecting “Russian-linked” accounts, listing a number of criteria. If a user is “guilty” of a single one, his or her account is considered to be “Russian-linked.”

#Twitter considers you "Russian-linked" if you have 1 of these:
-RU email
-RU phone
-RU credit
-RU IP
-RU as declared country
-Use Cyrillic pic.twitter.com/3cRnmEHdCs

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) November 1, 2017

The damning criteria includes, “whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time.”

This means anyone that has visited Russia or used a VPN with a Russian server could be deemed Russia-linked.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/408513-twitter-google-censorship-podesta-russia/

 

I never saw the image at top at the Christian Post... I only read articles that rubbished Trump like hell, until their Rubios, Job and Cruz were dumped by their own religious mobs... So eventually, the writers at the CP, reluctantly told their readers to vote for Jesus/Trump... They must have had a word with Putin on a secret phone line about the obvious Satan-Hillary connection... 

Laughing? Me? I don't think I will stop for the next three days...

And how do we know they were Russian operatives? Because they paid in Roubles... Unless they were Macedonians having fun...On a more serious note, I am surprised that the adverts have not been linked to the deed by Stephen Paddock!...

 

During testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a representative of Twitter admitted that his company discovered alleged Russian election interference on their platform by flagging every account with Russian text, email, phone, IP address and so on as a potential agent of the Kremlin.

It sounds like we're making this up, but we aren't. This statement came from the mouth of Twitter's Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett as he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. "We're looking at things like, whether they registered in Russia, do they have a Russian phone number, are they on a Russian mobile carrier, do they have a Russian email address, are they coming in from a Russian IP, have they ever… logged in at any time from Russia?" Edgett testified.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/science/201711021058740657-twitter-russian-kreml...

---------------

Sean J. Edgett, Acting General Counsel for Twitter, told the assembled lawmakers that the company had identified “nine [Russia-linked] accounts that…promoted election-related content Tweets that, based on our manual review, violated existing or recently implemented ads policies, such as those prohibiting inflammatory or low-quality content.”

According to Edgett, two of those accounts were @RT_COM and @RT_America. “Together, the two accounts spent $516,900 in advertising in 2016, with $234,600 of that amount devoted to ads that were served to users in the US,” he said.

RT, for its part, has not been made aware of any policy changes by Twitter, and which, if any, of the network’s promoted content has allegedly violated these new policies.

In a response to the statement by Twitter’s Acting General Counsel, RT is revealing the details of its advertising budget spent in 2016, as well as tweets promoted by the network on @RT_America and @RT_COM – including the top ones – in September, October and November. According to RT internal documents, both accounts spent on a year-long international ad campaign some $515,000 with @RT_COM channeling $475,000 and @RT_America some $40,000 respectively, to promote both individual stories but also to advertise the accounts and RT news apps in general. 

Which tweets did RT promote? Well, you can see for yourself: Below are the top 20 @RT_COM tweets from September.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/408506-rt-reveals-tweets-promotion/

 

Russian mission in Washington DC expressed hope that the spirit of cooperation will prevail after Google, Facebook and Twitter general counsels confirmed there was no proof that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The new testimony of Google, Facebook and Twitter general counsels to the US Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed there is no proof that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, the country's Embassy said.

"The Congress hearings of Google, Facebook and Twitter representatives have confirmed the absence of evidence of state-backed Russian interference in the US presidential elections," the Russian mission in Washington DC said in a statement on its Facebook page.

Google and Facebook general counsels told senators Wednesday that they have not determined that RT abused its advertising policies or accounts. Twitter’s lawyer said a day earlier only nine Russia-linked accounts appeared to have violated the firm's ad policies.

 

"Blatant provocations like this are damaging the already strained US-Russian relationship," the Embassy warned. "We hope that the ‘spirit of the Elbe [Day],’ the spirit of cooperation, including between the militaries, will prevail."

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201711021058743313-usa-google-facebook-dispro...

 

Just when you thought the anti-Russian conspiracy theories couldn't possibly get any loopier, they just did.

The Kremlin has already been accused of helping to put Donald Trump in the White House — and interfering in elections across the "free world"; now it seems those darned Russkies are to blame for Brexit too!

 

Writing his usual "Putin did it" column for the Observer on October 21, pro-war hack Nick Cohen, argues it would be unrealistic to believe Russia didn't interfere with Brexit, because it's interfered in the electoral processes of other western countries.

"On the rare occasions it bothers to discuss the subject, the British state says 'it can't happen here,' even though 'it' is happening everywhere else," he writes.

There's only one tiny problem with Nick's thesis. There's simply no evidence that "it" is happening everywhere else. In fact, no concrete evidence has yet been produced to show that Russia has interfered with any election anywhere.

France? The head of French Intelligence admitted that a hack of Macron campaign data before this year's presidential election was "so generic and simple it could have been done by anyone."    

Germany? Even the hawkish Washington Post said there was no Russian involvement.

The US? #Russiagate is currently unraveling at a rate of knots, with the latest revelation being that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the research which led to the dossier on alleged links between Trump and the Kremlin. As US commentator Max Blumenthal tweeted:

The central foundations of the Russiagate narrative are collapsing and all that’s left are Pokémon and puppy memes. https://t.co/99MjHHZpVu

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 25, 2017​

Which brings us back to Mr Cohen. Like the neocon propagandist that he is, he is taking this fake news of "Russian interference across the democratic world" to promote more fake news, this time about Brexit. In the same article in which he promotes his fact-free conspiracy theory, he accuses RT of inviting "conspiracy theorists" into its studios. You couldn't really make it up, could you? Iraqi WMDs anyone?

 

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201710301058654382-russia-brexit-cons...

 

 

Why is the USA trying to commit democratic suicide by various ways, including containing freedoms? Can the USA be save from itself and/or from damaging the rest of the world in a last gasp of malice and deceit? 

Andrew Korybko tells it like it is... or does he? Andrew Korybko is a political analyst, journalist and a regular contributor to several online journals, as well as a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. His book, “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, extensively analyzes the situations in Syria and Ukraine and claims to prove that they represent a new model of strategic warfare being waged by the US.

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

The US’ obsession with “proving” alleged “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election and America’s subsequent institutional destruction as a result will go down in history as representing the suicide of this former superpower’s soft power.

The US spent decades building up its soft power reputation as “the land of the free” and portraying itself as the most “democratic” society in the world, only to have generations’ worth of soft power investments dramatically done away with over the past twelve months as the media-manufactured “RussiaGate” scandal transforms into an institutional inquisition. It’s presumed that the reader is already generally aware of what’s going on and why, namely that hostile elements of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in full collusion with academia, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood, are vehemently working to subvert Trump’s surprise election victory by alleging that he only won because of secretive Kremlin support.

This is a completely false narrative that’s regularly debunked every time a newly invented accusation arises, but instead of crafting a different political approach to complicate Trump’s Presidency, the Democrats and their “deep state” accomplices have continued to advance this made-up storyline, and in the process they’ve inflicted irreparable soft power damage to the US’ international prestige. The country that was once the unquestioned superpower of the world has all but committed soft power suicide in the course of only a single year by confirming the same “conspiracy theories” that it’s worked so hard to belittle in the past, thereby exposing many of its international information campaigns as lies and ultimately contradicting the very essence of “American Exceptionalism”.  

The “Deep State”

Take for example the existence of the “deep state”, which no objective observer would have ever countenanced to be a “conspiracy theory” in the first place because it’s just a method of analyzing inter-elite rivalries within any given country. Nevertheless, the US and its surrogates consistently insisted for years that nothing of the sort existed, at least not in the US that is, and that anytime this was brought to the global masses’ attention by the mainstream media, it was usually framed as “democratic” or “Western” forces in a foreign government struggling against “authoritarian” ones. Only sometimes was it suggested that corrupt interests were behind this rivalry, but mostly in the cases when a Western government was implicated due to some sort of scandalous behavior. By and large, however, the prevailing American-imposed “groupthink” was that the “deep state” didn’t exist within the US.

Now, however, it’s irrefutable that “deep state” elements are sabotaging the Trump Presidency, and the most immediate consequence is that the global masses are realizing that the previous Mainstream Media-drive narrative denying the existence of the American “deep state” was just a lie, and that not only was it there all along, but that it had conspired to discredit anyone else who had previously tried to discuss it. 

Social Media Manipulation

Another “conspiracy theory” that the RussiaGate scandal has proven is that the American government finally acknowledges that voters could be manipulated by social media. Russia, China, Iran, and others had long been alleging this for some time, but because they’re attacked as “non-Western dictatorships” in the American and Mainstream Media discourses, the implied message was that they had just invented these threats in order to have a pretext for “cracking down on democracy and free speech”.

The US and its partners never took Russia or the others seriously when they said that people could be manipulated by foreign intelligence services over social media, but in a sudden about-face, Washington says that Moscow is capable of doing this within the US though without ever explaining why the CIA apparently can’t do the same in Russia or elsewhere.

Just like with the commonly denied existence of the “deep state”, the former “conspiracy theory” of social media manipulation has been revealed to actually be a truth that the US government was long suppressing until some of its hostile elements decided to wage their War on Trump. 

Misled Masses

It follows that if Russia was purportedly able to engage in social media manipulation, that the American masses are therefore easily misled, though this has been something that the US government denied for decades in order to portray its population as the most “democratically enlightened” in the world.

If the fake news narrative is to be believed, then Russia’s “weaponization” of social media was so successful that it caused masses of Americans to be misled into voting for Trump, thus negating at least 18 years of “democratic conditioning” in effortlessly submitting to crude “propaganda” and blindly voting for the candidate that the Russian “dictator” preferred. This of course isn’t what happened at all, but the fact that prominent American voices are inferring as much carries with it a degree of “authority” in showing the world that even the US “deep state” (which “officially” didn’t exist until after Trump’s victory) thinks that Americans are stupid.

Again, another pillar of American soft power crumbles as the “deep state” relentlessly attacks Trump with no concern being given to the profound collateral damage that they’re inflicting to their country’s reputation abroad. 

Imperfect Democracy

Most people across the world had some idea or another about the imperfect nature of American Democracy, but it was still regarded by some as being superior to the other competing systems out there.  After all, the thinking goes, if it wasn’t so effective, then it wouldn’t be the longest continually existing governmental model still around today, nor would so many wars have been fought to spread it across the rest of the world. The controversial Electoral College is assumed to be a unique characteristic of the US and therefore omitted from its “export package”, but that and a few other issues aside (Super PACs, lobbyists, etc.), the other shortcomings of American Democracy weren’t really all that well known, until now, that is.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201711011058735817-russiagate-us-russia-probe/

Read also "The Age of Deceit"
...

In a counterpoint to these Andrew Korybko views, someone called Natalie Nougayrède (an awarded journalist, former editor of Le Monde) tells a different story: that of Russian cyberwarfare. Of course, we know that the USA never engaged in cyber warfare. They invented their nasty spy programs, including Prism et al, for fun only. “They never tried to influence an election”, wink wink and “never intervened with invasion and other devious means when the result was contrary to their interests”, wink wink. Natalie Nougayrède writes some silly comments for The Guardian:

Anyone in Europe and Britain worried about the state of US democracy should take time to watch the videos of this week’s congressional hearings over Russian online meddling in the 2016 presidential election. If the words “checks and balances” mean anything, this surely is it.

My favourite moment is when senator Dianne Feinstein leans into the microphone and says sternly to the Facebook, Twitter and Google representatives (whose evasive answers have exasperated her): “You don’t get it! This is a very big deal. What we’re talking about is cataclysmic. It is cyber warfare. A major foreign power with sophistication and ability got involved in our presidential election.” 

We don’t yet know the full picture. In particular, we don’t know if Russian-promoted bots, trolls and online ads had an impact that in any way altered the outcome of the US election. At this stage, to claim they did may be crediting Vladimir Putin with more power than he actually wields. What emerged from the hearings is that Russia’s likeliest goal was to sow discord and confusion among citizens of the world’s most powerful democracy.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/04/beware-russian-cyber-warfare-threatens-every-democracy-kremlin

 

Of course Google got fined a few pretty billions for monopolising the cyberspace in Europe. A few adverts against Clinton on Twitter would have been far more than balanced by adverts in her favour — and many against El Dumbo.

We have to also consider that the very intelligent rational decision-makers, the bright citizens of America could have gone to the ballot box with a confused look on their face because of "Russian adverts". Could they have been the dumbest “deplorable” idiots on the planet to fall for these crappy adverts — peddled by the so-called Russians who were actually Macedonians, Syrians, Libyans and pissed-off natives of any other countries that had been bombed by La Woman Clinton and her president, Obama?

Do these people have the cyber infiltration technology? Nupe, no one needs a degree in encoding and decoding secret messagin to place an advert on Twitter, Facebook and Google. Just send the cash. Do it in Rubbles so that the money can be traced back to Putin’s own bank account... Laugh loud and cough. COUGH!

-------------

Senators raised the stakes against some of America’s biggest tech companies on Wednesday, telling them they must take more comprehensive action against foreign actors misusing their platforms. “You created these platforms ... and now they’re being misused,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told the top lawyers at Facebook, Google, and Twitter. “And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will.”

Feinstein’s remarks came during a blistering hearing of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian meddling interference in the 2016 election. It is the second of three hearings at which representatives for Facebook, Google, and Twitter will speak, following yesterday’s appearance before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) began the meeting by warning fellow senators that the precise influence that Russian interference had in the 2016 election will likely never be known. “What we cannot do, however, is calculate the impact that foreign meddling and social media had on this election,” Burr said. “Nor can we assume that it must be the explanation for an election outcome that many people did not anticipate.”

read more:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/1/16591646/facebook-senate-hearing-feinstein-russia-google-twitter

Yep... Feinstein is a rabid lunatic woman and only Rupert Murdoch anticipated (he knew) the result of the Presidential elections... His papers had been steadily burrying Clinton and promoting Trump in more devious ways than any Russian Kremlin little spy could ever think off. I would be more worried about people like him and Soros running the world media, inside and outsite the States, than any tiny moronic adverts from “Russians” who are not Russians. 

 

Gus Leonisky

You local meddling Russian from Gustaphianaland

 

 

Read from top...

 

Vladimir Putin’s propaganda victory is not the advertising itself, but the notion that just over $100,000 worth of poorly targeted Facebook advertising could swing a presidential election. It can’t.

It is important for the United States to acknowledge that Russia’s efforts were a direct attack on our democracy. But in the same way that we do not describe a terrorist attack as a victory for the terrorists, those seeking other explanations for November’s results shouldn’t succumb to the temptation to declare Russia’s meddling decisive. Besides that being a greatly exaggerated view of Russia’s capabilities, deeming the effort a geopolitical success emboldens Russia in its efforts to undermine Western democracies.

News of Russia’s meddling has produced some scary-sounding numbers: as many as 126 million Americans reached on Facebook alone, a further 20 million on Instagram, and 1.4 million tweets sent by Russian-affiliated accounts in the two months leading up to the election.

Yet, the Russian content was just a tiny share of the 33 trillion posts Americans saw in their Facebook news feeds between 2015 and 2017. Any success the ads had in terms of reach seems attributable largely to the sheer doggedness of the effort, with 80,000 Facebook posts in total. Facebook reported that a quarter of the ads were never seen by anyone. And — with the average Facebook user sifting through 220 news-feed posts a day — many of the rest were simply glanced at, scrolled past and forgotten.

 

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-russias-facebook-ad-campaign-...

 

Note "the Russians" have nothing to do with "Putin". Please read: 

 

The story of Fancy Bear

 

 

 

A Russian resident of Veles, Natalia, said that high levels of corruption and organized crime in the region, as well as a lack of job opportunities, means that writing fake news is seen as a respectable job here. 

"There is an issue with drugs and so on, which are transported across Kosovo and on to Germany, for example. There is the Veles mafia, that's a whole other issue. Unfortunately, a lot of young people here go down that path, and people who have some kind of intellectual abilities, who have made a half-legal business, there's only respect for them," she explained. 
A perfect storm of factors combined to turn Macedonia into the world's center of fake news, she added.

"The level of education is very high, particularly in IT. The computer programmers who graduate from the IT faculty can work anywhere. It's a small country, with good education, online access everywhere and high unemployment. I think it's mostly students doing it, who for some reason haven't left the country yet."

Last year's tsunami of fake news took the US media by surprise, and they have promised to be better prepared for 2020. Google and Facebook, for example, have launched a crackdown on fake news. The former shut down access to hundreds of websites registered in Veles and elsewhere, while the latter has rolled out a fact-checking tool. America will have to wait and see what the kids from Veles have up their sleeve for next time. 

read more:
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201709251057663134-veles-fake-news-capital/

 

The news item above show how fake news can be EASILY done. In Australia, we have some "respectable" (PRINTED) papers like the Northern Territory News which is full of half-baked news (The NT News is a morning tabloid newspaper based in Darwin, Australia. It is a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It primarily serves Darwin and the rest of the Northern Territory. Wikipedia) and a completely satirical seriously fake news website, The Betoota Advocate.

 

All you need is a bit of imagination, a few tools like Photoshop and a computer. Boom. This site, YD, is on the opposite side of the scale and, despite being satirical, is 99.99 per cent accurate on the real democratic news that should be known. Papers and websites of many MMMMM (mediocre mass media "de shit") promote slanted biased news to suit the capitalist system and anti-Russia rubbish. Some (ALL) editorials and "opinions" on global warming in the merde-och media for example are not worth reading and are more likely to be totally scientifically inaccurate, as they are written by specialist ignoramuses with a shockingly poor gift of the gab and an inkwell full of crap...

 

Note: the religious mobs have been expert of fake news for centuries. 

The caption, "Chancellor Angela Merkel with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday in Berlin," seems straightforward. The only problem? The man to Merkel's left looks nothing like the federal president.

 

From an earlier report by Financial Times, which features the same picture, we can learn that Steinmeier hasn't been spending his salary on plastic surgery. Instead, Merkel is shown walking with Stephan Steinlein, head of the federal presidency's office, after a meeting.

The NYT probably erred in reading the AP caption of the photo, which notes that Merkel was coming from a meeting with Steinmeier. Details, details. Perhaps the paper shouldn't have been so ruthless in streamlining its copy editing section this summer.

There are no comments regarding whether Mr. Steinlein is aware of his unexpected promotion.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201711221059313636-new-york-times-steinmeier-steinlein/

 

 

“One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases.”

“The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn’t lead to a Balkanization of society and allows ways of finding common ground.”

Barak Obama

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/world/europe/obama-prince-harry-interview.html?

 

What Barak is really saying:

“One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases, unlike the President of the Empire who knows best.”

“The question has to do with how do we discreetly control this technology in a way that mutes this multiplicity of voices, with a smaller diversity of only-allowed views, and that doesn’t lead to a Balkanization (a word always used in a pejorative manner to satisfy the smugness of the empire's destruction of Yougoslavia under false pretences) of society — to maintain the majority common single view for the Empire.”

 

 

We could add “whataboutism” to the list: the art of minimising negative aspects or crimes (such as the bombing of civilians in Aleppo) by pointing to what others have done elsewhere (the US army in Iraq, or discrimination in the US). Lumping everything together feeds confusion and indifference.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/propaganda-defend-...

 

Here this rubbish about propaganda from a right-wing propagandist, Natalie Nougayrède, who calls herself a journalist is beyond the pale of deceit... She could not stop herself from damning Russia for "liberating" Alleppo from Daesh and other Sunni extremists, meanwhile her "whataboutism" is vague and did not mention the US helping "liberate" Mosul from Daesh by bombing civilians as well. The numbers are NOT counted by the US, but of course "both Russia and the US try to minimise civilian casualties"... Not to mention as well that the USA had been sponsoring the rebels in Syria, including Al Qaeda and Al Nusra...

GOOGLE, the famous search engine, briefly listed "Nazism" as an official ideology of the California Republican Party, triggering the ire of its representatives. Google attributed the blame for the error to "vandalism on Wikipedia".

For a few hours on May 31, netizens interested in the Republican Party of California were able to discover by launching a Google search that it was influenced by ... the Nazi ideology. The search engine had indeed listed Nazism in the context of information that appears on the right of the screen, in good position among the other ideologies of the party, such as conservatism or economic liberalism.

This was an anomaly, spotted by the website Vice, that has legitimately enraged many Republican officials, while Senate elections will be held in the state next November. On Twitter, the Californian elected Kevin McCarthy denounced in a very shared message the process of which the party is the victim: "it's SHAMEFUL!."

Read more somewhere else... Read from top.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the “full extent” of so-called Russian meddling activity that took place on the platform during all of 2016 was $4,700 spent on some digital advertisements.

"Does Google now know the full extent to which its online platforms were exploited by Russian actors in the election two years ago?" Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked the search engine's chief executive during Tuesday's hearing.

"We have — we undertook a very thorough investigation, and, in 2016, we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia which advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising," Pichai responded.

"A total of $4,700?" Nadler asked to confirm. "That's right," the Google executive replied.

Google employees and executives contributed $1.6 million to 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201812111070598758-full-extent-russian-meddli...

 

And the $4,700 includes advertising for Jesus...? Read from top.

 

Like shooting fish in a barrel, twitter was sure of its reach — for cash... Here shooting fish in a barrel, one does not need to aim nor hit fishes — as the shockwave of the bullet is enough to kill the fish...

 

After RT published excerpts from Twitter’s “limited offer” to spend millions on US election marketing, the company abruptly banned all advertising from the news network. This makes full disclosure and transparency imperative, so here goes.

READ MORE: Revealed: How Twitter pushed RT to spend big on 2016 US election

On Thursday, the micro-blogging platform announced a policy decision to ban ads from RT and Sputnik, citing alleged meddling in the 2016 US election.

It followed Twitter’s report implying that RT was trying to influence US public opinion, crucially without providing context that virtually all news media organizations spend money on advertising their news coverage.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-rt/

 

 

The idea was for RT to spend some money "advertising itself" but not to have any opinions about the US elections, which MOST OF THE other PEOPLE ON TWITTER HAD. Or should RT have had an opinion, IT HAD TO BE IN SUPPORT OF HILLARY. In fact it looks like RT and Sputnik spent very little cash on Twitter and other social media platforms, in the USA yet they got blamed for shifting voters' opinions from Hillary to The Donald. Voters did not need RT nor Sputnik to tell them (voters) what Mr Murdoch had spent six month doing in discreet saturation... No-one in the US has blamed Murdoch for Trump's victory yet...

 

Read from top.

Protecting elections from social media manipulation

To what extent are democratic elections vulnerable to social media manipulation?

The fractured state of research and evidence on this most important question facing democracy is reflected in the range of disagreement among experts. Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly called on the U.S. government to regulate election manipulation through social media. But we cannot manage what we do not measure. Without an organized research agenda that informs policy, democracies will remain vulnerable to foreign and domestic attacks. Thankfully, social media's effects are, in our view, eminently measurable. Here, we advocate a research agenda for measuring social media manipulation of elections, highlight underutilized approaches to rigorous causal inference, and discuss political, legal, and ethical implications of undertaking such analysis. Consideration of this research agenda illuminates the need to overcome important trade-offs for public and corporate policy—for example, between election integrity and privacy. We have promising research tools, but they have not been applied to election manipulation, mainly because of a lack of access to data and lack of cooperation from the platforms (driven in part by public policy and political constraints).

Two recent studies commissioned by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee detail Russian misinformation campaigns targeting hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens during the 2016 presidential election. The reports highlight, but do not answer, whether social media manipulation may have influenced the outcome. Some experts argue that Russia-sponsored content on social media likely did not decide the election because Russian-linked spending and exposure to fake news (1, 2) were smallscale. Others contend that a combination of Russian trolls and hacking likely tipped the election for Donald Trump (3). Similar disagreements exist about the UK referendum on leaving the European Union and recent elections in Brazil, Sweden, and India.

 

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Science  30 Aug 2019:
Vol. 365, Issue 6456, pp. 858-861

 

Gus:

The other question of course is "protecting elections from mainstream media manipulations".

 

In the USA, there was two mainstream media fighting over who to elect as president: 

— The Liberal progressive media supporting Hillary Clinton, without really investigating her "sins", but salivating at the prospect of "the first woman president"...

— The CONservative media led by Rupert Murdoch that played an overt/covert game in the election of a lying "idiot".

The social media influence was NOT THE DECIDER.

 

 

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