Until yesterday, I was a long-time member of the Milky Way Scientists Facebook page. I seldom paid it any attention, or I’d have noticed that the admin got in trouble for copyright violations. In fact, I kept meaning to leave the group because the few photos that popped up on my timeline were rather dull. Then recently the page exploded into activity with dozens of vitriolic pro-Trump memes and posts. (I suspect the group’s admins jumped ship long ago.)
It reminds me of a friend who posted a photo of a crude pro-Trump tee shirt a guy wore to a kid’s dance recital (It was the crudeness in that setting that upset her, not the politics.), and her FB page got inundated with aggressively pro-Trump memes and posts; after she changed her settings to Private, she continued to get threatening PM’s and had to leave Facebook altogether.
I know politics can get pretty heated, but the sheer volume in both cases makes me suspicious. Is volume a sign of Russian hacking, or do the hacks tend to be planted subtly here and there? How do Russian hackers choose the sites/pages to target?
(Posting this to GQ because I’m looking for factual answers, not political opinions. If I’m wrong, mods, please move. Thanks.)
The ‘Comments’ section of Fox News appears to be inundated with suspiciously frequent posts. Even in the early a.m. hours, recent articles seem to have pro Trump posts appearing within a second or two. Foreign algorithms at work?
On the Straight Dope its the effect of late night US posts appearing to Australian, South African and European readers during their quiet lunch hours, allowing us to fire off a quick gem.
I’d suspect that Russian hackers work hard to make Russian hacking look like everything but. From the FBI report their effort was less on being the crazy troll than on creating the conditions where crazy trolls could flourish. They created fake news postings that people could link to, websites where they could corral the attention of likely future zealots who would otherwise be hard to track down, make the opponent’s possible voter base become just that little bit more cynical about the election process.
The ultimate prize in all this is getting your person into the White House. Since you live in a country where voting is discretionary and already faces problems getting adequate turnout, there is as much mileage in getting your enemy’s likely voters to decide to stay home, as there is in rallying your own supporters.
A second or two may be a bit too fast, but dozens of comments within even just 1-2 minutes is perfectly reasonable. Bear in mind that Fox News has over 16 million followers on Facebook. If even only a tiny fraction of them are reading an article as soon as it’s posted, and only a subset of that are commenters, that’s still dozens of comments very, very quickly after the article is uploaded.