Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 47m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.9% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}three hundred third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1504, Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Florence. On this day in 1862, the 4th Wisconsin Infantry participates in a fight at St. Charles Court House in Louisiana.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report Russia’s Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans (“Facebook acknowledged that Russian propagandists spent $100,000 on election ads. It neglected to mention how many millions of people those ads reached.”):
Russian-funded covert propaganda posts on Facebook were likely seen by a minimum of 23 million people and might have reached as many as 70 million, according to analysis by an expert on the social-media giant’s complex advertising systems. That means up to 28 percent of American adults were swept in by the campaign.
On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, revealed that Russia had “likely” used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans. It was Facebook’s first public acknowledgment of the role it unwittingly played in the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaign. Stamos’ statement was also conspicuous by what it omitted: Facebook has refused to release the ads. More significant, it hasn’t said what kind of reach Russia attained with its ad buy.
There may be a reason for that. On the surface, $100,000 is small change in contemporary national politics, and 3,000 ads sounds like a drop in the pond when Facebook boasts 2 billion monthly users. But it turns out $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times….
Scott Shane reports on The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election:
….An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.
On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. On Election Day, for instance, they found that one group of Twitter bots sent out the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times….
Given the powerful role of social media in political contests, understanding the Russian efforts will be crucial in preventing or blunting similar, or more sophisticated, attacks in the 2018 congressional races and the 2020 presidential election. Multiple government agencies have investigated the Russian attack, though it remains unclear whether any agency is focused specifically on tracking foreign intervention in social media. Both Facebook and Twitter say they are studying the 2016 experience and how to defend against such meddling….
David Graham ponders What the Russian Facebook Ads Reveal:
The news that Facebook ran tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads from a Putin-linked Russian troll farm is the latest evidence that the Kremlin has proved adept at turning those features of the American system it most detests into advantages for itself. Although Putin is an apostle of illiberalism, he has picked up on U.S. freedom of the press as a useful tool for Russian messages. In this case, propagandists for the nationalist Russian state are working to turn America’s diversity against it, using potent wedge issues to create and widen social fissures.
Foreigners are prohibited from spending to influence an election, so there could be a violation of law and Federal Election Commission guidelines, but it’s not like Russia is going to extradite anyone to the U.S. to face campaign-finance charges. The ads could only be further evidence of Russian attempts to interfere in the election, which at this point is acknowledged by nearly everyone save the president. But if, as Senator Mark Warner and others have implied, the Russians might have received guidance on who to target with the ads, it might point closer to the elusive smoking gun proving collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. There’s also no way to know whether the estimated $100,000 buy, a relative pittance by campaign-spending standards, is the end of the splurge or just the start….
The exploitation of the free press as a means to advance the Kremlin’s ends is not a new tactic. RT, the television channel formerly known as Russia Today, is a hybrid of an actual news-gathering operation with a propaganda outlet. But a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Russian interference in the election, issued in January, focused on the ways the Russian government used both traditional media and social-media trolling to further its goals in the election, and singled out the Internet Research Agency. That report cited a riveting 2015 article by Adrian Chen on the company, which describes how it functions as a troll farm for pro-Putin propaganda, as well as to advance the interests of commercial clients….
Denise Clifton reports Disturbing New Evidence of How Trump Is Boosting Misinformation and Propaganda:
The signs started popping up on the margins of social media as far back as 2010: Like-minded conspiracy theories spread by far-right sites like InfoWars and Russian government-controlled media like RT [Russia Today, a Putin-controlled propaganda mill]. Tweets that accused mainstream media organizations of reporting “fake news.” And later, social media networks that appeared to follow both white nationalist and Wikileaks-related accounts.
Initially, University of Washington professor and researcher Kate Starbird was studying how rumors spread on social media after disasters; they typically began with high volume after a crisis and then dissipated as news reports confirmed what happened. Then, in 2013, sorting through data after the Boston Marathon bombings, Starbird and her students noticed another kind of rumor—a kind that gained traction and volume over a longer period of time, in spite of facts confirmed in news reports. These longer-lasting rumors often intersected with politicized content. In the sustained chatter about the Boston terrorist attack, they noticed Twitter accounts pushing an alternative narrative, a conspiracy theory that Navy SEALS had bombed the race, not the Tsarnaev brothers.
Starbird mostly dismissed these kinds of alternative narratives as outliers, a conclusion she would later regret. Then came 2016, when hyper-politicized disinformation that spread in the aftermath of mass shootings and the Paris terrorist attacks was impossible to ignore. She and her team were compelled to dig deeper into the data. And as the “fake news” language of far-right and Russian media conspiracy theorists was embraced by Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, Starbird realized the phenomenon was going mainstream….
Margaret Sullivan observes that Facebook’s role in Trump’s win is clear. No matter what Mark Zuckerberg says:
….It’s even more obvious now after Wednesday’s news that Facebook sold ads during the campaign to a Russian “troll farm,” targeting American voters with “divisive social and political messages” that fit right in with Donald Trump’s campaign strategy.
The news, reported Wednesday by The Washington Post, fits right in with the findings of a fascinating recent study by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Analyzing reams of data, it documented the huge role that propaganda, in various forms, played in the 2016 campaign.
“Attempts by the [Hillary] Clinton campaign to define her campaign on competence, experience, and policy positions were drowned out by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails,” the study said.
The Trump campaign masterfully manipulated these messages. Truth was not a requirement.
And Facebook was the indispensable messenger. As the Harvard study noted: “Disproportionate popularity on Facebook is a strong indicator of highly partisan and unreliable media”….
Tech Insider contends here’s why people are afraid of clowns: