Biffer wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 8:23 am
I get pissed off at people who ask me to defend frothing loons but then in turn get offended when I ask them to defend, for example, the orange order fuckwits on the union side.
I get pissed off whenever somebody talks about politics online without realising how dodgy it is. Post Mueller report and uk Russia report there really is no excuse. I always think of this section from the Mueller report:
(ira - russian Internet research agency)
"5. U.S. Operations Involving Political Rallies
The IRA organized and promoted political rallies inside the United States while posing as U.S . grassroots activists. First, the IRA used one of its preexisting social media personas (Facebook groups and Twitter accounts, for example) to announce and promote the event. The IRA then sent a large number of direct messages to followers of its social media account asking them to attend the event. From those who responded with interest in attending , the IRA then sought a U.S. person to serve as the event's coordinator. In most cases, the IRA account operator would tell the U.S . person that they personally could not attend the event due to some preexisting conflict or because they were somewhere else in the United States. 82 The IRA then further promoted the event by contacting U.S. media about the event and directing them to speak with the coordinator. After the event, the IRA posted videos and photographs of the event to the IRA 's social media accounts.
The Office identified dozens of U.S. rallies organized by the IRA. The earliest evidence of a rally was a "confederate rally" in November 2015. 85 The IRA continued to organize rallies even after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The attendance at rallies varied. Some rallies appear to have drawn few (if any) participants while others drew hundreds.
From June 2016 until the end of the presidential campaign, almost all of the U.S. rallies organized by the IRA focused on the U.S. election, often promoting the Trump Campaign and opposing the Clinton Campaign. Pro-Trump rallies included three in New York; a series of pro-Trump rallies in Florida in August 2016; and a series of pro-Trump rallies in October 2016 in Pennsylvania. The Florida rallies drew the attention of the Trump Campaign, which posted about the Miami rally on candidate Trump's Facebook account (as discussed below).
6. Targeting and Recruitment of U.S. Persons
Investigative Technique IRA employees frequently used Twitter, Facebook, and lnstagram to contact and recruit U.S. persons who followed the group. The IRA recruited U.S. persons from across the political spectrum. For example, the IRA targeted the family of-and a number of black social justice activists while posing as a grassroots group called "Black Matters US."89 In February 2017, the persona "Black Fist" (purporting to want to teach African-Americans to protect themselves when contacted by law enforcement) hired a self-defense instructor in New York to offer classes sponsored by Black Fist. The IRA also recruited moderators of conservative social media groups to promote IRA-generated content, 90 as well as recruited individuals to perform political acts (such as walking around New York City dressed up as Santa Claus with a Trump mask). 91"
The UK Russia report puts it simply as
"• general poisoning of the political narrative in the West by fomenting political extremism and ‘wedge issues’,28 and by the ‘astroturfing’29 of Western public opinion; and general discrediting of the West"
Also
"(iii) Lack of retrospective assessment
47. We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian
attempts at interference, ***.53 This situation is in stark contrast to the US handling of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, where an intelligence community assessment54 was produced within two months of the vote, with an unclassified summary being made public. Whilst the issues at stake in the EU referendum campaign are less clear-cut, it is nonetheless the Committee’s view that the UK Intelligence Community should produce an analogous assessment of potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and that an unclassified summary of it be published.55
48. ***. Even if the conclusion of any such assessment were that there was minimal interference, this would nonetheless represent a helpful reassurance to the public that the UK’s democratic processes had remained relatively safe."
And
"(i) Failure to prepare
41. There has been credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.44 However, at the time ***. It appears that *** what some commentators have described as potentially the first post-Soviet Russian interference in a Western democratic process. We note that – almost five years on "
It has been great to see Russia's disinformation machine fail on the Ukraine war. I had 2 former colleagues in 2016 befriended numerous attractive females on facebook (who in turn wanted to be friends with me) who shared and posted brexit memes relentlessly. These attractive females had hundreds of predominantly male and old British friends. Facebook shutdown these accounts pretty much overnight after a certain article came out. I know this because after said article came out I went to take screenshots and it had all gone.