This. It isn't about just one tweet from xXxRussianAgentxXx that millions of Americans saw. It's about multiple curated tweets and other social media efforts disseminated into the US's own system of social media and unfiltered news coupled with concerted efforts by people like the alt-right to turn a single made up news item into a narrative preached as truth on national TV and out of the mouths of our very own politicians. You don't need to go to every single house in a city to poison the population. You just poison the water supply.
Hell yes Americans are too mentally strong to be influenced by propaganda. Hell, go in to any thread about advertising and many members will proudly state how they would never be influenced by such things. They must be Americans, as we can not be influenced!
I guess that 9.5 billion in campaign ad spending* for the 2016 election cycle was just for kicks. Nobody could possibly prove that somebody who watches those commercials or reads those ads would vote for them.
I know I'm going out on a limb to give [strike]folk[/strike] ordinary American voters the benefit of the doubt here.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam? No thanks.
You still can't directly prove that causal pathway - see Russian troll tweet, become influenced by said tweet, vote for Trump because of tweet. Only way you'd know this is if someone self reports that. And correlation /= causation - they are two totally different things. Anyways, we prob shouldn't clog the thread on that one small disagreement. If you want to keep discussing it we can def do so over PM. Because LL_Decitrig is right, this is immaterial.
You're absolutely right. This discussion about effectiveness of the trolling is basically just a side bar between me and III-V. So I'll just end it here.
I sincerely appreciate the benefit of the doubt, thanks :) Likewise, and will try to pay it forward in kind.
When I said "benefit of the doubt", I wasn't referring to you and the other guys I quoted, I was referring to American voters in general and their susceptibility to the tweets of Russian twitter trolls. I should've been more clear. I'll edit.
No problem. As an American voter myself I can take it that way too.
To expand, you've said this a couple of months ago:
But please pay it forward in kind as well, I'd appreciate it!
Hey, chadskin ! Hope that wasn't meant to be a "gotcha"! lol. Yeah, I've since changed my mind as more information has came out since I made that comment. It's really, literally, that simple. No need to go down this road. We're not on the old site anymore so I hope you don't feel like you need to be adversarial towards me. But I appreciate you putting in the effort; must've taken a bit of time to login and search all that post history and I'm always flattered by that.
I will say I think US politicians didn't need the help of Russia to do that, but I'll save that convo for the appropriate thread since I delved into that a bit already here.
Hey, now. Be nice.
Does Russia even have an extradition treaty with the US? I'm assuming they do since Obama asked them to extradite Snowden.
Sorry, I completely missed the bolded. I find today's indictments to be quite lackluster because of the original claim of hacking the election, hacking the DNC server, and/or somehow directly interfering in the election apparatus. Spreading propaganda over social media is nothing major or special, it's par for the course - every nation does this, from hasbara troll farms to US' own Cuban twitter. States do this to one another. I don't condone it, but it's hardly major. So, meh, I'm not impressed.
fwiw last we heard the DNC hack was being investigated by a separate team at the FBI - Mueller and the DOJ agreed it would be best to keep that aspect of the investigation with the original agents & prosecutors. If & when they bring charges on that front (and it was reported months ago that they have enough to indict at least six russians) it probably won't come from the special counsel's office.
Good reminder.
Yes, this is what former prosecutors who worked on those kind of cases always say. That's why everyone who's informed a bit is patient, and didn't expect to see a Trump indictment quickly.
