This is really a pretty fascinating example of psyops in the wild. Propaganda for both "tribes" assembled in opposition over various issues in order to sow more division between them. Imagery clearly designed to influence with emotion, twisting the dials of fear, anger and pride in the audience.
The power to disseminate information (or disinformation) is not one that should be taken lightly. It seems that most of the human race was deployed to production with a pretty critical RCE vulnerability, and the patches available (education in its various forms) do not appear to be sufficient to protect the whole system from corruption.
> It seems that most of the human race was deployed to production with a pretty critical RCE vulnerability, and the patches available (education in its various forms) do not appear to be sufficient to protect the whole system from corruption.
I don't get what education has to do with it.
HN is a forum full of hyper-educated users, but it still greys out downvoted comments by default. I don't think the reason for that is because it makes it slightly more convenient to read comments. I think the reason is because it lowers the probability that hyper-educated users get irritated and end up expending energy responding to low-effort comments.
how are these any different than the standard appeal to emotion arguments that groups make in good faith? e.g., why is an ad trying to raise awareness about black lives matter from russia any different than an ad trying to raise awareness about black lives matter from black lives matter?
> The power to disseminate information (or disinformation) is not one that should be taken lightly.
curious to know if you believe the power to disseminate info should be regulated by the govt.
Some of the ads I was reading were would take extreme stances that make the other side get a distorted view of a group. I saw an LGBT ad from Russia that suggested we make it illegal for heterosexuals to adopt. This would do damage to said movements in that people will ignore their legitimate messages as well when them deem them extremists.
good point; that could indeed cause 'unnatural' dissension.
(a related phenomenon that occurs even w/o impostors: people in group A tend to pick the most outlandish, crazy members of opposition group B to critique (and vice-versa); each group, by focusing their criticism & attention on the least-reasonable members of the opposing group, becomes convinced that only unreasonable people are in the opposition. (and any large group will have unreasonable members, of course.))
I think this showed another more fundamental problem with Facebook. Their focus on increasing user engagement can end up putting users in hyper-partisan walled gardens. Then people can end up less willing to compromise.
> how are these any different than the standard appeal to emotion arguments that groups make in good faith?
That's what's so fascinating about this. I don't see a reasonable way to prevent it from happening. The tools optimized for extracting money from people are also apparently pretty good at sowing discord.
> curious to know if you believe the power to disseminate info should be regulated by the govt.
The term "pirate radio" is a thing.
The internet democratized the power to disseminate information without permission or consequence (with some exceptions, obviously), and I think that's a good thing.
Honestly at this point the only reasonable solution I can come up with is a "one weird trick" ad campaign that directs people to a magically effective MOOC on critical thinking.
The internet was not quite so bad before content recommendation engines. It was very much a "pull" experience, other than banner ads for porn and malware.
Now, Google and Facebook can specialize their content directly to you and your interests. Watch a slightly out of mainstream video? Maybe you would like this one that's further out there. And the more you click, the more YouTube thinks it knows you, and it can keep feeding you worse stuff. It's not that it's being malicious exactly, but it's got an ability to push you that Web 1.0 just didn't have.
It used to be that you would go down a link rabbit hole and maybe find some really awful stuff, but the next day the only thing that remembers it is your own browser. Nobody comes along and starts emailing you about it.
> The internet was not quite so bad before content recommendation engines. It was very much a "pull" experience, other than banner ads for porn and malware.
Very true, and because of that the depth of the internet was not available to the uninitiated. The "push" of recommendation engines opened up a world of possibilities for the denizens of the internet who didn't know how to find new things that would interest them beyond typing the name of a site into a url bar.
It also opened up a world of possibilities for monetization, and here we are.
For instance, you might try to push a particular movement to an extreme by selectively targeting and pushing the most extreme version of their ideology. This isn't standard outreach ("come join our org") but it's trying to build a radical faction inside the existing organization.
The goal is, you destabilize the whole organization and hope to end up either cleaving it in half or getting the whole thing coopted by the extreme nut jobs.
Well, you need to consider the subtext as well, which can be very different from what you expect. e.g. that nice image of a woman in a Stars and Stripes hijab talking to Hillary Clinton with a pro-Hillary tagline? Targeted specifically at users believed to be anti-Islamic.
The pictures don’t tell you the whole story and shouldn’t be taken at face value.
To take the analogy further, if education in its various forms represent the patches, they have been MITM'd, compromised, and sold on the dark web. This seems to be the achilles heel of a consumer culture: it's also in the corporate interests to have weak education and psychologically compromised consumers.
I agree, if they control all these pages they were advertising as then it'd be much more interesting to see what they were showing the people who responded to these ads and liked their pages. A lot of them look like pages designed to radicalise .
It'd also be interesting to see what the official campaigns targeted advertising looked like, including that of related arms length groups that presumably do the dirty work.
I think the point is that they pander to both sides of any argument to increase the divide and lessen the chances of society making a sane compromise. Much more effective than just spewing insanity and hyperbole.
Extreme progressives would destabilize the country by setting up structural racism and sexism in order to achieve "equity", dissolving borders, gutting the police, and over taxing companies.
Extreme rightists would destabilize the country by repealing too much of the social safety net, closing down the country to immigrants, militarizing the police, and letting companies behave anti-socially with no repercussions.
Our enemies are smart to try to push us into embracing extreme policies. Either way they win. Because when our institutions start to fail we won't be able to project power anymore. It will draw us off of the world stage to some extent.
Nothing could ever make compromise more unlikely than a winner take all voting system that has then predictably created exactly two parties whose followers again following the incentives rarely have an original though beyond "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Worse yet: "the opposite policy of my enemy is my policy". We're seeing situations on both sides where people are taking positions in arguments solely because it's the opposite position of their opponents. Because taking any less than the polar opposite position would be seen as "going soft on them" by their electorate. It's a total shitshow.
The funniest example right now are the Rs who are against USA violence in Syria but for it in Iran, juxtaposed with the Ds who are against USA violence in Iran but for it in Syria. Syria and Iran are allies, and there is no compelling reason for USA violence in either nation. The whole war media narrative has really gone off the rails...
False equivalence, though. Syria is a country already in a civil war, where the nominal government has used chemical weapons on its own citizens multiple times, afawk. Iran is a stable partial democracy that is, afawk, complying with an international agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons.
South Korea and the US are allies too, but only one of us is at war, albeit technically.
Yeah if we talk to a Republican she'll have her own ridiculous arguments in the other direction. There is no "afawk". Every new detail we hear about supposed Syrian chemical attacks is worse for the war media narrative. And what's the point anyway? USA weapons are killing innocent people in at least five nations, right now. How would deaths of innocents in some other nation justify adding that other nation and its nuclear-superpower ally to our list? The only reason the "civil war" wasn't over years ago is that we have continued to flood it with munitions. Even after the supposed "good rebels" fled the area we continued to ship arms in, only to "whoops, they've mistakenly gone to ISIS again". ISIS only exists in the first place because of our ridiculous yet in retrospect remarkably similar decision to kill a bunch of innocent people in Iraq. How many times do they have to repeat this desultory performance before Americans remember what happened the last time they believed it?
Just a note: calling oneself a deplorable makes it very tempting for me to deplore you. It's really weird social signaling: someone says you're a terrible group, and they start calling themselves the terribles as if that somehow proves the original point wrong.
I'm more ambivalent about the use of "nasty woman" -- perhaps because I'm blue tribe, but also because the word "nasty" is more ambivalent. It can mean annoying, cruel, promiscuous, or just gross. If it's the last meaning, saying that people have a reflexive negative emotional judgement of you is a far cry from the above, which is a moral judgement.
That's where the right-left model breaks. This is not an extreme right wing thing, it's statist authoritarianism. Can be embraced by both sides, extreme or not.
Any ideas how prohibiting these types of ads next election cycle will pass constitutional muster? Most were several steps removed from references to any election. And non-citizens residents are generally held to have rights under the 1st Amendment (https://www.google.com/search?q=non+citizens+1st+amendment)
Or will it just be Facebook blocking them by way of policy?
I see a bunch of the pictures they advertised organized events. How did that work if these ads and supposedly pages were run by Russians? Were those events real? Who showed up? Who organized the protest on the ground?
> The Russians also recruited and paid real Americans to engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies. The defendants and their co-conspirators pretended to be grassroots activists. According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians.
And this is a tiny blip compared to hacking into the DNC's email servers. I see a lot of these ads are stupid and people totally think that was all there was. The ads were the part of the iceberg you can see.
Yeah, the ads were just the content they paid for. This doesn't take into account all the sockpuppet accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit that were designed to swing conversations in the direction they wanted them to go.
Also, link aggregator sites (like our very own HN) are susceptible to vote manipulation, which can promote the content the attackers want, and demote the content they don't want.
These ads were just to rope people in. You can see that "Black Matters" has 200k+ members. Those are people who are now getting information directly from the Kremlin on their feeds now.
Youtube was pretty big as well, and Google ads were also utilized IIRC. The videos from the people from outside the US pretending to be Americans is a pretty sad impersonation unless one is kind of in a bubble looking for reinforcement of certain stereotypes/views.
i cannot believe we still havent seen a major news story on reddit. the night and day takeover of the_donald was very obvious to me. i wish someone would write an in depth piece on the nature, scale and timeline of the operation there.
The Radiolab podcast had an episode a while back where they interviewed some of the event participants. It was organized and funded via remote sources (they were implied Russians, although the organizers weren't interviewed), but attended by locals. Some of the locals that were interviewed felt duped, others were somewhat indifferent.
Pretty good listen if you're interested in a deeper dive.
All Americans on both sides should be outraged at Russia. Their goal is to further divide us via social media and thus news which they have been extremely successful at.
This idea of misinformation, mallace, trolling, psychological warfare is the single most issue about technology that makes me uneasy and nervous.
No, even some of the "quote" smartest people I know fall for it. It's a seperate part of the brain. That's why I always try facts > emotion politically.
The wording on many of these ads is odd. In hindsight they are clearly written by a non-native english writer, but perhaps the Facebook audience is used to awkward writing by their peers?
This is an indicator of a large scale operation. Scaling an operation entails a degree of tolerance to the degradation in the quality of the product, especially when the marginal benefit from quantity significantly exceeds that of quality.
Cyber space is a high leverage domain which rules out the possibility of a shortage in resources from the opponent. It is also a recent evolving space which makes it more difficult to assess the opponents capabilities, reach and sophistication.
By its nature this operation seems to be part of a bigger destabilisation strategy, maybe a stress test to validate different tactics.
I would be really worried once the ads become well written which would increase the complexity of the situation since quality measures can be manipulated.
In other words once they can fake "fake news", things might get really weird.
I don't think their goal was actually to sway the election. They know well enough that their work is pocket change compared to what both parties' campaigns and ordinary American activists on both sides already do. What they want to do is increase the divisions in our society. The more we fight each other, the less political "bandwidth" we have to project power internationally.
If both parties are unified in pursuit of one goal, then we may act vigorously on it over the long term through the course of multiple changes in which party controls what. If both parties can't stand each other enough to cooperate on anything, then foreign policy and behavior will be half-hearted pushes in constantly changing directions.
Russia can't and doesn't want to control us entirely. They do want us to not interfere effectively in their attempts to control the neighboring Eastern European states.
The ads were for Facebook groups, so once they built up a decent subscriber count, they had an audience to propagandize to without paying.
As for the pro-LGBT/liberal ads: One of the strategies the Russians used here was to infiltrate and divide. Only propagandizing to one side of the American political spectrum isn't as effective as playing both sides and turning them against each other.
These ads are just the tip of the iceberg. There were still countless bots and sockpuppet accounts used to sway people one way or the other - but typically against one another.
I don't believe the Russian goal was to sway the election. I think it was to try to exploit identity politics on both sides, to make the US less united, and hence to distract attention from Russia and what they've been doing. (For example, in Crimea - remember that?)
It sounds like that, however, if you check the root of that domain you will see that it's a forum for gore photos and videos from real accidents, deaths or medical conditions, so the domain name is somewhat proper :P
What's interesting is who they targeted - they targeted right wing patriotic movements as well as left wing gay rights groups and minorities who may feel disenfranchised like Muslims and blacks. It's as if they looked at America's very polarized and heated political environment and saw it as an opportunity to create division.
No politician/Russian has pled guilt to collaborating (which is not a real crime) the closest thing they have charged is conspiracy to defraud and I expect they will have to drop those in the long run, you should read the charges more carefully.
Rick Gates plead guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States, however it appears that's not Trump related.
I think it may be correct to pick on some of the details, but as far as I can tell there's overwhelming evidence that Russian agents tried to influence the election, and anybody who denies that I assume does so for partisan reasons.
Why were Russians doing ads to support democratic cause? I thought it was strongly believed that they wanted Trump to win. Doing some divisive thing to get some sort of twisted outcome feels like far out conspiracy. That bring me to question: how much confidence do we have these are Russian state sponsored ad?
I was wondering how far down I'd have to scroll to find the first sensible comment. Congrats.
The internal logic of these claims is non-existent. During the actual campaign Hillary and her supporters were convinced Russia (the generic bogeyman of the western establishment everywhere) was shilling for Trump. After all Trump was a lot more friendly and Hillary was stating that she'd shoot Russian planes out of the sky over Syria, so such a motive would have at least made sense.
Now that whole narrative fell apart entirely. We have the head of famously anti-gay and conservative Russia posting LGBT memes and supporting Hillary, despite the risk of war between Russia and America should she have won.
Yet, the desire to believe is so strong, that like all conspiracy theories it's simply morphed into whatever the smallest step to fitting with new information is, that preserves the core. Now it's all a genius plan to "sow division" by posting pictures of fox statues made of shotgun cartridges. Quite why Russia specifically benefits from generalised "division" or why US culture needed help being divided is left unexplained.
This is exactly the behaviour you'd expect to see if people with strong motivations were looking at noise. Leading us to your last question:
how much confidence do we have these are Russian state sponsored ad?
We only appear to have Facebook's word for it. But you have to watch out. One of the subtle ways this conspiracy theory tends to morph and warp is the distinction between the Russian government and Russians. Even in the headline of this thread, note that it's "Russians" and not "the Russian government".
There are liberal Russians. There are conservative Russians. There are 144 million Russians, a little under half the population of the USA itself. If even 0.1% of them decided they cared about the globally-famous US election, and if Facebook had simply selected "ads paid for by Russians", then this is exactly what you would see - a mishmash of stuff with no unifying theme or agenda.
Or Facebook could have just made a mistake. The government asked them to find evidence of Russian interference, and let's face it, going back with "there's nothing there you are all delusional" is not a good political strategy. I'm sure they felt they had to find something.
I’m sincerely at a loss for how most/many of these could have influenced the election. Part of me think that Congress is making mistakes and Putin is scrolling through these, laughing hysterically that we actually think he’d pay for this nonsense.
Most of these pages won’t be so forthcoming in their desire to influence. The idea for these ads is to pay for reach and credibility. Send it out there and hope that it goes viral. After which you’ve gathered a whole new army of people who have liked your seemingly innocent page. After that it’s just a matter controlling the tone on that page using bots to create a false narrative. As humans, we are so used to be told what to do that it becomes easy to follow the general flow of your social circle. If everybody you hang out with hates one politician, then the chances that you’re also going to hate that politician is high. So by creating pockets of people who are all there on the page because they have something in common, you can control it and therefore controlling the direction of their thoughts by manipulating their peer circles.
The ads were mostly for Facebook groups. Once those groups had a substantial subscribership, the Russians were able to push out far more vitriolic propaganda without having to pay for the audience.
Repeating "just the tip of the iceberg" three times in this discussion already looks like programming of public opinion kind of thing. Without proof of any sort.
That trick is as old as the Church that invented it for the obvious purpose.
That's like "election meddling" repeated on CNN 10 times per day just to convince people "it was something but we will not tell you what".
Because the Democrats on the congressional committee that released them released them as 300+ MB PDFs. This site just printed them all as images and posted as-is.
i wonder if this release is going to be the turning point for the current facebook anti-hype cycle? the ads don't paint such a horrible picture as it was supposed to be.
The ads were mostly to signal-boost political groups. They were just the tip of the iceberg.
There were many Russian state controlled political Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers who joined because of these relatively tame ads. Those groups then pushed a more extreme set of values onto the subscribers, with the aim of turning those groups against each other.
Sure, an anti-Sharia-Law demonstration doesn't seem so bad, nor does a pro-Syrian-Refugee demonstration. But if the same group is organizing both events to take place at the same time and location, then that group is just stirring the pot and trying to divide society against itself.
The ads are a big deal for what the accomplished, not just for what they read at face-value.
You're trying to make a psychological argument against a sociological effect.
No, a single Spongebob meme didn't sway your vote. This is obvious.
But hundreds of thousands little manipulations of social media did have ripple effects throughout existing communities, and created a more divisive political atmosphere that absolutely could sway peoples votes.
For example: Hillary doesn't really have all that bad a political history. She wasn't a great candidate, but she also wasn't the "Killary" character right-wing media portrays her as. You, however, think that "her record" is self-explanatory, because you keep hearing people talk about her as if she were the antichrist.
I would be curious to hear about "her record" from you, but I suspect you're just going to bring up Benghazi, Uranium One, her e-mails, or maybe even Pizzagate to explain why she was unelectable. This, in the end, just illustrates the point that repeating misinformation constantly will convince people that it is the truth.
At the end of the day, propaganda divided the DNC into two camps and turn those camps against each other, destroying any sense of unity during the election. You chose a side, it ended up being the losing side, and the whole debacle likely cost the Democrats the White House, yet you're still unable to see that you were played.
"This, in the end, just illustrates the point that repeating misinformation constantly will convince people that it is the truth."
"You chose a side, it ended up being the losing side, and the whole debacle likely cost the Democrats the White House, yet you're still unable to see that you were played."
Lots of brigading, of both comments and votes, on this thread. Just look at all the phrases that are constantly repeated. I thought this set of images would somehow inspire a different set of responses, especially since it came from "documentingreality.com", but in future I will just flag and move on.
I'd be happy if these were "self-made" imaginary worlds. That would at least be interesting, and the average of a bunch of random steps from reality is probably something pretty close to reality. Most of these individuals seem to be living in the same obviously-false war-media-created imaginary world, so in aggregate they're very far from reality.
The complete and utter intentional lack of understanding of the current Russian influence campaign, the ongoing congressional investigations, and the special council investigation in this thread is appalling.
Once upon a time I thought HN was:
A) Well-informed, and
B) Not a place for political discussion.
Honestly if you can’t find fact from fiction in news articles, just read the damn source documents. You’d probably find it fascinating, instead of just something to dismiss as a bunch of politically-motivated time-wasting.
I know this comment is against the guidelines, but so is nearly every single comment on this story.
Your comment may have been cathartic but it basically leaves me wondering what you are talking about? Which source documents? What "understanding?" So far the press's reporting on this has been appalling, and in general the public has been kept in the dark.
I think you seriously overestimate how unbiased you are.
I say this because you talk as if it's easy to separate fact from fiction these days. If you think it's easy, then I think there are some very important things you're missing.
I wish my point came across clearer. It wasn’t that I am unbiased. It’s that the comments on this story are willfully ignorant of what we do know. For example it hasn’t been a secret for well over a year that the Russian disinformation played both sides. Yet what do we find? Repeated surprise at the lack of onesidedness in the linked advertisements.
There is a media/political machine at work every day pumping out propaganda that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to "hack" the election in Trump's favor. It should not be surprising that this has been effective in priming people to believe that Russian social media psyops (this is decidedly not "disinformation" as it is largely information-free) were specifically targeted toward glorifying Trump and demonizing Clinton.
> These are images of the Facebook ads the Russians purchased to try and alter the 2016 U.S. Election. These were released from Congress
And what does congress base this on? Looking through a bunch, they don't seem to favor either Hillary or Donald... is it supposed to prove that the elections weren't tampered with? Or am I missing something?
Edit 2: Oh and 2017-Q3 has a lot in favor of Donald's wall and poses Hillary as satan (for no apparent reason). Perhaps that's the proof? By far the smallest album of them all? I am not saying I don't believe the Russians influenced the elections, but I do not see anything obvious for or against in this dataset, either.
Good thing that the media and their multiple layers of fact-checkers and editors didn't fall for the Russian's evil plan. They have learned a lot since the 30's and the Cold War.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. One of the worst things to come from modern media is that editors do not fact check because they want to break the story before anyone else and fact checking takes time.
Oh, didn't even notice that (as I don't follow (American) politics that closely). Seems even more unlikely that this had anything to do with the elections then.
This is wishful thinking. Sadly, Trump is consolidating his grip on power while the morons on the "other" side have their heads in the sand. Rs will win complete control of both houses at the federal level and at least 40 states this November. Then they will start churning out awful Constitutional amendments. Will that also be the Russians' fault, or will Ds finally get some accountable leadership that looks forward to victory rather than whinging about past failures?
To clear up your question, I believe it was Facebook that identified the ads as being of Russian origin and specifically purchased by Internet Research Agency (and then provided to Congress)
Eh, of course these aren't even supposed to directly champion one or the other. Their point is clearly to amplify the existing "us vs. them" mentality, make people even more entrenched, and to encourage the thinking on both sides that the other side is out to get them. Classic divide and conquer.
But how does this change results? There are still two main candidates. If those leaning toward A lean harder toward A, and those leaning toward B lean harder toward B, no votes were changed as a result of this effort. There is no box to check on the ballot for "I'm really sure, so count my vote twice!"
A great unmentioned step in this whole bizarre theoretical process is the idea that, absent some FB ads, lots of Republican voters would have looked deep into their souls the night before the election and realized that God and/or Rachel Maddow wanted them to vote for Hillary. This idea remains mostly unmentioned because it is really implausible. Those who believe it should examine this belief critically enough to stop believing it.
It isn't about the candidates - think about the long-con. Heated people in an argument tend to ignore rational reasoning. Heated, divided people tend to ignore olive branches "by the other side", and miss potential chances to talk it out and find the truth in the middle. Heated people tend to cherry-pick "facts" in the news/science to further their own agenda - and once when the populace is divided, it acts as a wonderfully lovely* buzz-saw tailor-made to erode democracy because people who fight to the death for "their side" and ignore others tend to make rather obtuse policy choices/votes over the course of the next few decades. Which in turn, impacts the US's global stance little-by-little.
>There is no box to check on the ballot for "I'm really sure, so count my vote twice!"
Besides what sibling comments said:
But there is the option of not voting/voting implausible 3rd candidate because screw the main 2.
So theoretically you could have non-influenced reps staying at home, because they dislike both candidates.
Or have influenced dems vote Bernie (or don't vote) because Hillary just isn't good enough, when without influence they'd have pinched their nose and voted Hillary.
Or if you don't insist on it being about who wins, you could imagine it about the loosing side being so riled up, that they hinder the winner and turn the winner into a lame-duck president.
Probably the same ignorance that leads all port scans from Russian VPNs to be labeled as RUSSIAN HAX. Some were paid for is rubles but anyone can do that.
Dude, take a breath. You're really pushing your own narrative here. Why so many posts that say the same thing? Seems like you have a point of view that you REALLY want others to share, which seems a little inappropriate in this context.
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The power to disseminate information (or disinformation) is not one that should be taken lightly. It seems that most of the human race was deployed to production with a pretty critical RCE vulnerability, and the patches available (education in its various forms) do not appear to be sufficient to protect the whole system from corruption.