The problems are bigger than Bernie, bigger than Hillary, bigger than any set of policies either one
Last edited Sat Sep 9, 2017, 11:57 PM - Edit history (1)
could have put forth.
If you think Bernie would have had a better chance than Hillary, then you'd have to believe that Russia would have been fine with a Bernie win -- even though Trump was the one they'd been cultivating for years, and Trump was the one they were counting on to drop the Ukraine sanctions and to overturn the Magnitsky Act.
Why would anyone think Russia wouldn't have intervened on Trump's behalf no matter who was the Democratic nominee? Do you think Bernie is the kind of man the Russian billionaires and oligarchs would have wanted to be President? How could anyone with respect for Bernie believe that to be true?
Hillary didn't lose because she was less POPULAR. She lost because of James Comey's letters and because of some even more important factors -- more important because they're not going away. They will be used against us in every election going forward, unless we can stop them.
The big problems are voter suppression, Russian meddling, and targeted voter propaganda through Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other forms of social media. There is no question that the Trump campaign, through Cambridge Analytica, did this -- and that the Russians did this. The only question is how much they conspired together in the propaganda campaign.
We need to figure out how to defend the democratic process from fake news and micro-targeted AI propaganda -- or lose our democracy.
ON UPDATE: Deleting your Facebook account won't solve the problem. The propaganda is being pushed all over the web on all the social media. And even if you were to cut yourself off from all forms of social media, millions of others are getting all their news, and fake news, from these sources.
If you only have time to read one article today, please read this:
https://toinformistoinfluence.com/2017/02/17/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine/
“This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go,” said professor Jonathan Albright.
Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle — a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas.
SNIP
Because dark posts are only visible to the targeted users, there’s no way for anyone outside of Analytica or the Trump campaign to track the content of these ads. In this case, there was no SEC oversight, no public scrutiny of Trump’s attack ads. Just the rapid-eye-movement of millions of individual users scanning their Facebook feeds.
In the weeks leading up to a final vote, a campaign could launch a $10-100 million dark post campaign targeting just a few million voters in swing districts and no one would know. This may be where future ‘black-swan’ election upsets are born.
“These companies,” Moore says, “have found a way of transgressing 150 years of legislation that we’ve developed to make elections fair and open.”
SNIP
UPDATE: Examples of some of the dark ads are here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/30-batsht-crazy-mostly-racist-facebook-memes-the-russians-used-to-corrupt-your-mind?yptr=yahoo
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's going to take a hell of a lot of undoing to rid ourselves of this madness. 
Cambridge analytica was on TV IIRC questioning the Venezuela election. Yes I agree 100% you have to be circumspect. However ultimately people make up their own minds and the worst possible outcome of this ad campaign may be that someone sees a post to a FB group of a fake friend, and then decides to go read more about something.
in the case of messageboard /pol/ I can sincerely believe a good part of the trump groundswell was organic in nature, manipulated or not.
there are a lot of people on some messageboards and it's like a ripe zit that was ready to pop
