Washington Post says Russians are sending us fake news - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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the Washington Post wrote:Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
By Craig Timberg November 24

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

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Many of the publications mentionned in the above article (or by shadowy organization PropOrNot, the only source cited as "experts") have written columns denouncing this new tactic of smearing news services that don't tow the official lies of people in power.

Counterpunch wrote:Timberg and the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, are being stridently called out as McCarthyites for an article published on Thanksgiving Day that cited unnamed “experts” at a shadowy group called PropOrNot to smear 200 alternative media sites as tools of Russia. The blacklist included some of the most informed and courageous voices on the Internet like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Truthdig, where the brilliant Chris Hedges, part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, regularly asks the uncomfortable questions ...

Theories abound as to why Timberg would write such a shoddily sourced article and smear some of the best writing and thinking on the Internet. One line of thought is that corporate media is struggling to survive financially and needs to take out its competition. Others see something far more nefarious.
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So now that all our news agencies are lying to us, the only problem these "official" rags can see is that some news writers aren't telling the same lies.

WMDs, babies being torn from incubators, Iraq's nukes, Afghanistan did 911, and many other lies that the Washington Post has told (in order to buy permission for wars that benefit their advertisers).... can't exist in an unregulated media environment, so they are pushing for a repression of actual journalism.

This is as scary as having a "president" who is pushing for less real government, or an Environmental Protection agency that is working towards hiding environmental damage, or a climate change plan that does nothing to stop environmental destruction, or....

Orwell will soon be banned.
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SolarCross wrote:I'd love to get paid to be a troll, I wonder how one applies for a job like that? :excited:

In the capitalist countries "paid trolls" are called "social media representatives" and almost all large corporations have them.

The pay is similar to many PR jobs.

A lot of the "comments" you see in newspaper articles whose content might affect specific corporations are written by these reps working for these corporations.

Which is why the fact that a whore media like WaPo, which repeats whatever bullshit it gets paid to repeat, looks silly talking about "other people's trolls." They're simply not credible.
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So now that all our news agencies are lying to us, the only problem these "official" rags can see is that some news writers aren't telling the same lies.


:up:
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Not everyone lies. Maybe nearly everyone, but not everyone. Gotta stay away from the alt-right intellectual trap: everyone lies and you merely choose between competing sets of lies.

There is an actual truth. Not easy to determine most of the time. Lots of self-serving mistakes you can make when assembling facts into a big picture. Nevertheless, you gotta be looking all the time for the truth. This is the only way.

It's interesting to me that some of the 'fake news' sites listed on PropOrNot happen to be among the best tools for finding that truth. PropOrNot is clever in mixing in the obvious propaganda outlets to muddy the issue.
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quetzalcoatl wrote:Not everyone lies. Maybe nearly everyone, but not everyone. Gotta stay away from the alt-right intellectual trap: everyone lies and you merely choose between competing sets of lies.

While it's encouraging that "not everyone lies all the time," it's not enough. What is really important is that under capitalism, the truth becomes a hidden commodity for most people who usually find out "the truth" when their baby dies of fracking-poisoned water.

There is an actual truth. Not easy to determine most of the time.

Capitalism obscures the truth to the point that it makes everyone really stupid, and this stupidity makes our extinction almost a sure thing.

This may be important (or I might be lying and buying a new car and using Pledge to shine your furniture might be more important)
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