This link has been bookmarked by 158 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Feb 2020, by Iam me.
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06 Jan 21
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07 Sep 20
jose muriloICYMI: The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
https://t.co/FmLioDQhSU https://t.co/0iml6BACB9 -
19 Aug 20
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28 Apr 20
Josh GauthierI find myself thinking about this at least once a day:
https://t.co/wW3zihsN1O https://t.co/05wxN5KfMD -
14 Apr 20
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09 Mar 20
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23 Feb 20
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22 Feb 20
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20 Feb 20
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18 Feb 20
Tim CongramThe Boy Scout motto "Be Prepared" is a necessary reminder. This chilling article outlines how online communication tools can and assuredly will be used to undermine the fairness of our election. But one way to counter propaganda is to know what's coming.
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16 Feb 20
Peggy George(Thread) Things To Do
Democracy is under attack.
The antidote is more democracy (what Obama calls “citizenship”⤵️)
Our democratic institutions are being battered and damaged.
The antidote is to strengthen the institutions.
Need ideas? Stand by. . .
This article by @mckaycoppins in @TheAtlantic “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President” is the most chilling & thorough preview of the electoral #disinfo nightmare we are on the eve of that I’ve read to date. Highly recomme -
15 Feb 20
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Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.
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In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.
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The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.
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Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”
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After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.
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The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.
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Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.
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Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.
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“Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”
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When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”
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Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”
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There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.
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By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.
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“He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
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13 Feb 20
John EvansThe 2020 Disinformation War - The Atlantic https://t.co/jZeN6WPnpw via @nuzzel
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Jan Zuppinger"Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise."
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12 Feb 20
Melonie FullickEvery teacher of high school English and Social Studies, especially those teaching #APLang, journalism, and #medialiteracy, must read this terrifying article. #aplangchat https://t.co/OFZ1Zyc33h
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Marie SlimEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Jennifer BarnettEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Linda WadmanWhen is this person going to be questioned under oath about his illegal spying on @realDonaldTrump? https://t.co/X0bm45PyRu
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Petter HareimEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Andrew WilsonEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Marc SnyderEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Mary BernasEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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fredklierAnd speaking of #citizenship, imagine if you and your #DemocratMob had ever respected and protected it. Imagine if you had actually enforced our #immigration laws and our borders. Imagine if you hadn’t tried every trick in the book to encourage rampart #
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Kathy GillWhat's old is new again: computational propaganda & troll farms are this young century's leaflets & radio stations.
Active citizenship will help defend against the use of "weapons of mass distraction" by parties & governments, but we'll need t -
John GraneyEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Tania GroszEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Carolyn TrippEven if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/
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Muzaffaruddin Alvivia All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69/corpgov' http://bit.ly/2Mw5vpR
#CorpGov All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69_corpgov'
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11 Feb 20
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10 Feb 20
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That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread
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assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions.
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ing every headline. It w
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. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locat
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learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—
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rad Parscale
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just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.
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skin-care line, an
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—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’
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t first in cutting-edge ad techno
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arscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to
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Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools
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Pomerantsev, a res
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Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.
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. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative fact
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ffort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process o
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messages
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he weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica
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e said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election
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y in the viral spread of fake new
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ge, the music, even the colors of the “Donate”
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tion of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the
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lanning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”
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ometown news” stories t
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d “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters
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le may be Indonesia, w
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Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parsca
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Whitney CoxI was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.president election propaganda media news information information literacy disinformation politics social media internet
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09 Feb 20
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missumami$1 billion for the campaign, 3,000 data points on every voter in America, anonymous messages sent to millions of voters' phones without their permission, wars on the press, twitter bots spreading misinformation.
What could possibly go wrong here?
https -
08 Feb 20
Donna Baumbachtweet added to diigo
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Sheri Edwards"...fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press" -https://t.co/n0jvbTptEf
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Ed Allen..And this must-read detailed account of how "pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in US history" to sow confusion - "tactics...that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power": https://
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C HayesConservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”
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07 Feb 20
martineaupTrump and his allies are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history this year—and we’re not ready. My new feature for the March issue of The Atlantic: https://t.co/wW3zihKoqo
Even if the methods are new, sowing the seeds of doubt, division, and discord to turn Americans against each other is an old trick. The antidote is citizenship: to get engaged, organized, mobilized, and to vote - on every level, in every election. https:/ -
Grace Rodriguez1. A big chunk of the the Trump campaign's money is funneled through a company run by campaign manager Brad Parscale.
So this is interesting: "In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house" -
Bob CalderI tried to-- oh, fuck it https://t.co/D1gI9Gbxp1
"Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence dissident shouting in streets; they can use me
In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes about how the relentless onslaught of propaganda conditions people over time to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” That may be 2020's legacy. -
Luis AccorsiIt’s almost lunch time, Facebook employees! So grab your reusable straw, head on over to one of many cafeterias, enjoy Hard Shell Taco Thursday, and read this:
https://t.co/w4NLzXVXNX -
Christopher AllenOne day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. vi… https://ift.tt/2Us74t0
media social Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
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06 Feb 20
Marlene DeanHow new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election
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Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim.
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K. LuellaRather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.
election atlantic cuilture journalism propaganda mckaycoppins
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