Just A Question. Speaking of Election Day 2016. The DU Website Was Hacked And Hijacked That Day.

[TrollBuster9090]

Is it still the conclusion that it was Trump supporters who did it, and not Russian trolls? I can't imagine there are many Trump supporters with the savy to hack a left wing activist site.

[gopiscrap]

1. I pretty much feel it was an entity with something to gain

by trump winning

[bearsfootball516]

2. I don't think Skinner ever figured it out.

My gut says that it was probably a 4chan troll with good computer skills who just wanted to piss of Democrats on election day. I don't know what motivation Russia would have to do it.

[33taw]

4. Polling irregularities could not be easily communicated and addressed.

Also, we should not assume all republicans do not have tech skills. They selected Cambridge Analytica early on to assist them.

[TrollBuster9090]

5. I would have thought they'd like to get access to the site so they can collect personal information

on the users, as well as IP Addresses of the users. If they every found out that some real politicians or left wing pundits use this site under a pseudonym, they could expose them, and cause a small scandal.

Also, if the exit poll data didn't match up to the results; or if weird vote tallies started coming in (like 10,000 people in a certain county voting for the Republican, when there are only 6,000 registered voters there) the first alerts to funny business are usually sent out on sites like this one. If they could block that from happening, it would be easier to accept the election results on face value.

Just my thoughts.

[TSheehan]

3. Oh there are plenty of Trump supporters with hacker skills. They may be evil, but they're not "dumb"

There's definitely a creepy underbelly to Silicon Valley and co. there.

And yeah, Russian trolls could have done it too, but so could any number of malicious people, foreign or domestic.

[yardwork]

6. The video that played on the site was full of Eastern bloc white supremacist imagery.

If you look up "DU hacked 2016" on YouTube you will find the video that was played by the hackers. It's illustrating a bombastic song which has the chorus "I know a hero will come." Very poorly done cheesy animation shows Trump dressed as Napoleon, with long blond hair, riding a rocket holding the head of a stereotypically Arabic-looking man. There are also images of European fascist leaders from the 20th and 21st century. And there are caricatures of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and others making them look evil. There's a hapless caricature of Bernie Sanders being kicked or something. There are images of African figures "invading" Europe. The video is highly eurocentric, which makes me think that it was created by an Eastern European, rather than someone in the U.S. (A U.S. creator would have included more imagery of Latin American immigrants, I think.)

Also, the video - which was not created by the hackers but was apparently already on the web as an illustration of the song by some group I've never heard of - had imagery superimposed on it by the DU hackers. A cartoon of Trump in a car with a gun saying "Get in faggots we're making America great again." That particular slur, used in that way, strikes me as very old fashioned and out of date, leading me to think that the image was created by people for whom English is not their first language.

This doesn't prove that the hackers were Russian but I think they were.

[TrollBuster9090]

7. Yeah that's right. This was the video.

Lots of pictures of Putin dressed as a French field marshal. Also, I don't know who'd include Augustus Caesar, other than Romanians and Bulgarians.

[yardwork]

8. It's fascinating to me. I definitely think that the video was created by an Eastern European.

[TrollBuster9090]

12. Yes, it has a VERY European feel to it.

They've thrown in a few American white-supremecist symbols, like Pepe the Frog, as window dressing. But the rest of it is very European.

[Baltimike]

9. They are the same....whether by dereliction or design. nt

[yardwork]

10. This recent thread is relevant.

In 2015 and 2016 DU was overrun with trolls promoting Putin.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=11542372

[TrollBuster9090]

11. I remember that guy. I remember him getting incredibly defensive when I made a post about ..

..about Turkey shooting down the Russian Su-24 on the Syrian border in 2015. If he was a troll, it would make perfect sense. There were also a few troll-types who would swarm in whenever I'd mention Wesley Clark's direction of the Kosovo conflict. They'd usually accuse him of being a war criminal, and say a bunch of things about what he and NATO did in Kosovo that weren't true. That makes sense, given that NATO was attacking the Serbian militias (who were allies of the Russians), and trying to stop the militias from committing genocide. If you were in Russia at the time, you would have gotten a very different view of Kosovo.