Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during US election

[MelissaB]

Source: The Guardian

... snip

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.

... snip

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.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/donald-trump-russia-investigation-fake-news-hillary-clinton?CMP=share_btn_tw

[OKNancy]

1. Reading more of the article.. I suspected that those fake stories

were targeted to Sanders people. Too many Sanders folks or fake Sanders people repeated the fake stories about Clinton.

[Blue_Adept]

3. And so many posters here disappeared so quickly...

[Edina]

22. I think I know where some of them went....

caucus99percent.....sometimes I scroll through their noxious comments. lot's of hillary hate over there...not sure who is real or not but they are off the rails. not in reality especially considering who they helped get elected the POTUS. a little creepy how many on that website are actually proud that HRC lost and that they had a part in it. "She Presisted, We Resited" memes and another bad one showing Hillary in a straight jacket with the heading, "But it's my turn!"....sick stuff. I think most of it is fake, or at least I HOPE it is fake!

[Skittles]

18. yup

they sure did buy a lot of the anti-Hillary bullshit

[joeybee12]

2. They need to investigate Fox Noise also

Pretty effing obvious where they got their fake news

[Botany]

5. Fox news was the vehicle where "they" promoted and pushed the fake news into ....

.... the main stream press. Those fake Hillary is a crook stories gained traction
w/those unceasing and unneeded Congressional investigations too.

It was a coup and we had treason.

[joeybee12]

7. The Clinton Cash author got lots of exposure there

He worked for Breitbart, Fox promoted the Breitbart lies and hate

[BumRushDaShow]

6. They all go back to Breitbart

who needs to be investigated - notably when TheGrimpReaper was running the show.

[joeybee12]

8. And Fox promoted Breitbart

Fox made that fake news mainstream

[Tanuki]

24. Don't forget that Breitbart is a pet project of big data evil genius Robert Mercer

https://www.justsecurity.org/41199/connecting-dots-political-microtargeting-russia-investigation-cambridge-analytica/

[BumRushDaShow]

25. Zombie Andy

is celebrating mightily!

[Shell_Seas]

4. Can someone tell me the legality if...

..a far-right website coordinated with Russia for this?

Can't a private person or private business conduct themselves in this way and it would still be legal?

Or would this constitute some type of treason and to what extent?

[hughee99]

11. If posting bullshit and conspiracy theories on the internet was illegal, we'd have to start building

a lot more jails. If posting bullshit isn't illegal, I'm not sure how "conspiring to post bullshit" would be illegal.

[Shell_Seas]

12. I didn't think so, but wanted to make sure.

So, it's ok for private citizens to seek or have the assistance of foreign nations in bombarding us with fake news in order to skew an election. Legally ok, but maybe not morally, (but who am I to judge).

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the fairness doctrine and how it should come back.

[mopinko]

14. iirc the illegal part is where russian entities paid to boost fb stories.

that would be an in-kind contribution from a foreign person, and illegal.

[Shell_Seas]

16. Even if you are a private citizen or business?

[sharedvalues]

9. Fox and don't forget right wing radio

Limbaugh has 13M viewers per week.

The lies and propanganda of Fox and Limbaugh has been going on for decades. And they're damaging the country just to stir up votes to benefit GOP billionaire donors. Murdoch is paying Fox News to incite hate just for tax giveaways for himself.

[riversedge]

10. RawStory: What are they hiding?: Pro-Trump websites fall under investigation for Russia collusion

I like this headline better.






‘What are they hiding?‘: Pro-Trump websites fall under investigation for Russia collusion




http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/what-are-they-hiding-pro-trump-websites-fall-under-investigation-for-russia-collusion/




05 Jul 2017 at 09:30 ET


Investigators looking into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election are now exploring whether pro-Trump websites coordinated with the Russian government to release fake news aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The Guardian reports that investigators are examined the role that fake news websites, many of which were based in eastern Europe, played in depressing Democratic voter turnout by hyping anti-Clinton news stories on social media.

John Mattes, a former reporter who ran online campaign operations for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) last year, tells the Guardian that he believes Russian-linked websites specifically targeted Sanders supporters with misinformation about Clinton to make them less likely to support her after the contentious 2016 Democratic primary.

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts,” he told the Guardian. “It screamed out to me that something strange was going on.”

Mattes estimates that 95% of these new websites went dark shortly after the election, which leads him to believe that they were part of some kind of foreign intelligence operation.


“So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?” he asked.

Former FBI counter-terrorism expert Clinton Watts shares Mattes’ observation that many of these websites were so in sync in pushing the same kinds of fake news stories that it would be hard to believe there wasn’t some centralized coordination involved.

“They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,” Watts told the Guardian. “And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”....................................

[dalton99a]

23. +1

[Sunlei]

13. "1,000 paid internet trolls" from ONE paid media group. Imagine there are several media companies

to hire. kellyanne runs one business for social media spamming- facebook and twitter.

Aren't they the business who just added 2 million BOT-twitter accounts to follow trumps personal account and auto-spam, spam spam RE- tweets?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

15. Death threats: I think Russia may be supplying personal info to people making them

WaPo, Newsweek, and CNN reporters / editors say that they receive death threats with their names and addresses and other personal info in them.

It would not surprise me if the Russian intelligence services or their hired operatives are finding and funneling this information to people known to make death threats. It may appear to the threat maker that it is simply somebody on an alt-right / militia / Trumpanzee site posting it.

A "fellow traveler", as the phrase went in the 1950s when it was applied to people sympathizing with international communism.

[certainot]

17. a lot of the trolling relies/relied on talk radio to spread and repeat

that's the way it's worked for 30 years and now the sources are more modern.

most of the putin trolling piggybacked repetition and buzz only talk radio could create - 30 years of it and 25 attacking hillary. all the benghazi/email shit was nothing without 1200 radio stations. how much did breitbart play in that going back to their start? before that it was a russian hack that limbaugh used to create 'climategate' that trump limbaugh still cite as proof that global warming is a hoax.

how long have russians been playing limbaugh and sons? have they been paying for free-lance work?

[bucolic_frolic]

19. Message boards across the internet were deluged with propaganda trolls

In poor, broken English, on a top 10 city newspaper site, one of them defended
Melania's convention speech by saying Michelle Obama had originally stolen it
from a book published in 2006. The troll was laughed off the site ... you mean
no one noticed for 10 years? Seriously?

So yes I do believe we were flooded with fake news stories.

[Iplayoneontv]

20. It's possible they were also using those media companies to launder money

We're getting closer!

[Julian Englis]

21. K & R