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2020-09-03 Home Front: Politix
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The Absurdity of the Latest ‘Russian Interference’ Story
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[Spectator] A tiny troll farm is blown up into international news.
It’s two months out from the election and the New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
Continued from Page 4
has decided to once again conjure up the specter of Russian interference in American politics. The charges are the same as last time — gullible Americans being brainwashed against the Democratic establishment — but the evidence presented veers off into parody.
As of Tuesday evening, the top story on our top newspaper’s homepage is a report about the latest connivings of the infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-backed propaganda group that was featured in the Mueller report for supposedly manufacturing anti-Clinton content in 2016. According to the FBI, the IRA has returned in 2020 with a new website designed to convince left-wingers to stay home rather than vote for Joe Foreign Policy Whiz Kid Biden
 ...Candidate for president in 2020. You're a lyin' dog-faced pony soldier ...
The website is located at peacedata.net and appears to be a professional, if perhaps poorly formatted, opinion blog. The FBI claims that the site is owned and funded by the IRA, though it has apparently hired genuine American left-wing journalists to write pieces. The report quotes one anonymous progressive freelancer who states that he had been paid $75 per story and had been hired almost instantly through a job board.
The conclusion to be drawn from the existence of this website, according to Biden campaign front man Bill Russo, is that "Russia is attempting to interfere in our elections on behalf of Donald Trump
...His ancestors didn't own any slaves...
," apparently by depressing the progressive vote.
The fact that the New York Times has decided to turn this website into a headline news story is patently absurd for two reasons.
First, peacedata.net reads identically to any orthodox left-wing blog. It consists primarily of articles bashing Trump and right-wing media, with some anti-interventionist pieces sprinkled in. To the extent that there are anti-Biden articles, they are few and not particularly compelling. The site says quite literally nothing that your average Facebook-using progressive won’t have heard a hundred times before from friends or other outlets. Compare it to an outlet like Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, a U.S.-based publication which fills the same editorial niche and does a much better job at it.
Second, the site is incredibly obscure. While view count totals are difficult to determine, Alexa gives the peacedata.net a global ranking of #243,267, which is down from its peak of around #210,000 in July; despite almost a year of continuous effort, the Russians never managed to break into the top 200,000 websites worldwide. NYTimes.com, by contrast, ranks at #88 worldwide. It is plausible that the Times article has received more views in the few hours since its publication than peacedata.net has received cumulatively since its creation in 2019.
Nonetheless, we are expected to believe that it would grow into a serious danger in the two months until the general election.
All of this is to say that the ineffectual IRA is serving as a convenient excuse, a trumped-up casus belli, for the mainstream press to once again traffic in Russian interference innuendo. No doubt New York Times readers are nostalgic for the classics.
An example thereof from The Times of Israel: Facebook nabs Russia-linked campaign to fuel US chaos
Facebook says it has caught a budding Russia-linked campaign to fuel political chaos in the US, working off a tip from the FBI in its latest take-down of coordinated inauthentic behavior at the leading social network.
The small network of 13 Facebook accounts and two pages posing as journalists and targeting left-wing progressives was removed for violating a policy against "foreign interference" at the platform.
The investigation that uncovered the covert operation, which was linked to the Internet Research Agency in Russian (IRA), started with a tip from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to Facebook head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher.
The network was in the early stages of building an audience, with little engagement from users, Facebook says.
"They put substantial effort into creating elaborate fictitious personas, trying to make fake accounts look as real as possible," Gleicher says while briefing news hounds.
The group posted on topics "including social and racial justice in the US and UK, NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
and EU politics, alleged Western war crimes and corruption, environmental issues, the founder of Wikileaks, tensions between Israel and Paleostine, the coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
 ...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
pandemic, criticism of fracking, French influence in Africa, the Biden-Harris campaign, QAnon, President Trump and his policies, and the US military policies in Africa," Facebook says.
Profile photos were generated using computer software to appear more realistic, and unwitting freelance writers were recruited to write material to be posted online, according to Facebook.
The Facebook pages were said to be crafted to drive viewers to websites of the social network, and their operators were working diligently to get approval to run targeted ads.
"It follows a steady pattern where particularly Russian actors have gotten better at hiding who they are, but their impact is smaller and smaller and they are getting caught earlier," Gleicher says.
"These actors are caught between a rock and hard place: Run a large network that gets caught quickly or run a small network that has limited reach."
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Posted by trailing wife 2020-09-03 00:00||
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Posted by Besoeker 2020-09-03 07:29||
2020-09-03 07:29||
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