Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 10m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM, her Community Development Authority Board at 5:30 PM, and there’s a scheduled Public Information Meeting on the relocation of the city’s dog park from 4-6 PM.
On this day in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit. On this day in 1863, “1st Wisconsin Cavalry participated in an action at Dry Valley, and the 1st, 10th and 21st Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in a skirmish at Rossville Gap.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report an Exclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities (“‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life”):
Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.
The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.
The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.
“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald”….
Bill Buzenberg reports that Putin’s Pro-Trump Operation May Have Been Far Bigger Than We Yet Know:
It’s been nearly a year since the US intelligence community publicly announced its determination that the Russian government took covert actions to sway the 2016 US election. We now know that Russia did so in part by buying Facebook ads and weaponizing bots, trolls, and other social media tools created by US tech giants. But there is still much that eludes the public about these attacks, as New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg pointed out on Monday: We don’t know what these Facebook ads looked like, we don’t know who they were targeting, and we don’t know how many millions of Americans may have been exposed to them. As the Washington Post reported, congressional investigators “have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign.”
We do know an elaborate plan for influencing the election reportedly was drawn up in 2016 by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank controlled by the Kremlin, according to reporting by Reuters. One document “recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to seven US officials cited.
Another document that came from that Russian think tank last October, according to Reuters, “warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency”….
Matt Gertz explains How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda (“Drudge Report has linked nearly 400 times to RT, Sputnik News, TASS since 2012”):
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The next day, President Barack Obama alleged that the responsible parties were Russian-backed separatists seizing territory in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama’s statement came amid a furious effort by Russian propaganda outlets to foster confusion about the act. In their telling, the tragedy had actually been a failed attempt by Ukrainians to shoot down President Vladimir Putin’s plane.
The Russian propaganda effort received a substantial boost when right-wing internet journalist Matt Drudge highlighted a story on the topic from RT.com, the website of the Russian government-backed English-language news channel RT. Drudge titled the resulting item on the Drudge Report, his highly trafficked link aggregation website, “RT: Putin’s plane might have been target…” in bright red text.
After Drudge propelled the RT story to his massive audience, it was picked up by right-wing U.S. conspiracy websites. (Others on the right warned that Drudge had gone too far by aiding a Russian disinformation campaign.)
This was not an anomaly. Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.
Drudge’s increasing affinity for and proliferation of Russian propaganda comes amid what The New York Times calls “a new information war Russia is waging against the West”….
James Kirchick contends that RT wants to spread Moscow’s propaganda here. Let’s treat it that way (“It should register as an agent of a foreign government”):
Last week, the Russian government-funded cable network RT announced that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.
Originally passed in 1938 to address the scourge of Nazi propaganda, FARA requires any individual or entity acting “at the order, request, or under direction or control, of a foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department. The agent must then periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf. FARA does not in any way circumscribe what foreign agents may say or publish; the law merely requires that the information they disseminate be clearly labeled as originating from a foreign government.
The first entity convicted of failing to comply with FARA was a news service operated by the Nazi regime, and the law has remained relevant ever since. The New York bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS registered from the 1940s onward, as did a variety of other Soviet media outlets including Pravda and Izvestiya. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was recently made to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party after failing to do so from 2012 to 2014. Applying FARA to RT (and possibly Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded Internet “news” service also being investigated by the FBI) is long overdue….
(RT would be free to speak, but identified candidly as the state-controlled tool of the Putin regime that it, in fact, is.)
Here are The Strangest Sights Cassini Saw: Postcards From Saturn (via NPR’s Skunk Bear):