Putting this out there for those not familiar and wishing to understand Russian influence in the USA. This coincides with the current hearings at which the social media companies are being called to give evidence.
We’re obv. at a less important stage of the election cycle so this isn’t crucial, what is does reiterate is the immediacy of the effort - the daily, hourly reiteration of emphasis and targets.
I read recently that 128 million Americans were exposed to this stuff on Facebook alone during the Trump election campaign (this link is Twitter only), so the scale of the issue becomes very clear. Interesting stuff, the US clearly edged Putin in Ukraine but Putin is well ahead of the curve here:
I DO fuckin blame US society. But blame isn’t a stick of butter to be sliced up and divvied out. Blame, here, is a thunderstorm, and it can rain equally on the idiots who believed the ads, the trolls who made them, and the assholes who took advantage of the confusion.
Blaming the people who fall for ads is kinda silly, since our entire economy runs on them.
There is no reason that political ads of any kind should not have proper sourcing. Heck, all ads should–it’s just that, if you’re selling a product, it’s usually pretty obvious who is selling it.
Absolutely not. But the goal is to educate the public. Without turning into a police state we aren’t going to be able to shelter people from mass media.
Only one group can be reached effectively out of your three.
Good luck in that. It won’t even solve the problem since shills will do what ads do and will be practically indistinguishable from non shills. This is a tough problem but is also why we are supposed to not be a pure democracy. The electoral college could have dealt with this in theory.
OK, I’m gonna make ads claiming that Coca-Cola is made from the vomit of pregnant sheep with scrapie. Is that OK? If I’m told to cease and desist, is this a police state?
I wouldn’t think that you’d want to give the Trump administration power like this, especially given his verbal sparring with the media. up_the_junction’s Twitter dashboard says:
It kind of sounds like you’d either have to expand the scope of these proposed sanctions to non-state actors (which, to emphasize a second time is a scary-AF idea) or accept that any such sanctions are only going to have a limited effect on the situation.
If people make important decisions based on a random person’s tweets or forum posts that’s a problem with that person. Would you take 401k advice or medical advice from a random stranger? If so is the problem the random stranger?
No, and yes. You persist in thinking that if a scammer engages in a scam that targets stupid people, the scammer is blameless. This is a bullshit rationalization used by con artists for decades, if not centuries. The victims may be dumb, but the scammer is still a terrible human being.
I never said they were blameless now did I? No. What I clearly said was without draconian new laws you aren’t going to rid western democracies of propaganda. I said it with words like jail and forward a meme but the idea is the same. In the age of mass media and too much democracy the best possible solution is educating the public. The downside is that the public has a mean IQ of 100. So good luck.
Now the founding fathers recognized this and instituted non direct election or appointment for senators and the president and the federal judiciary. My preferred solution is to head back in that direction. That, unfortunately, is not politically palatable, yet.
I never wrote that. I’m not sure what you are reading.
You want to address the source. You can’t in a liberal democracy. Do you not understand people and groups of people have the fundamental right to communicate, more or less, as they wish?
Uh, the latter? Of course I don’t think any proposal is going to be a magic bullet.