White Supremacists Pose as Antifa Online, Call for Violence

If one were to believe Donald Trump and William Barr - who increasingly reminds me of Herman Goering - all of the violence over the last number of nights is due to fa left activists and Antifa.  The reality, as with all things with Trump, is quite different and behind the scenes are white supremacists - Trumps core base - who want to spark a race war, something Trump would likely welcome as an excuse for ordering military troops to fire on citizens who oppose his regime and the endemic police brutality directed towards minorities, particularly blacks. As CNN is reporting some white supremacists are posing as Antifa and aiding in creating the pretense that violence is flowing only from the left.  Sadly, there exists a mix of white supremacists, so-called militias, and, of extreme right "Christians" who want to take the nation back to a pre-desegregation 1950 and who would embrace a dictator if it assisted in achieving that goal.  Here are highlights from CNN:

A Twitter account that tweeted a call to violence and claimed to be representing the position of "Antifa" was in fact created by a known white supremacist group, Twitter said Monday. The company removed the account.

"This account violated our platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. "We took action after the account sent a Tweet inciting violence and broke the Twitter Rules." Although the account only had a few hundred followers, it is an example of white supremacists seeking to inflame tensions in the United States by posing as left-wing activists online.
 The revelation of the account comes as President Donald Trump increasingly blames left-wing activists for violence occurring at protests across America.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted he would designate Antifa a terrorist organization, despite the US government having no existing legal authority to do so. Antifa, short for anti-fascists, describes a broad, loosely-organized group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left — often the far-left — but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform.

The fake account, @ANTIFA_US, tweeted Sunday, "ALERT Tonight's the night, Comrades Tonight we say "F**k The City" and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours #BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica."
 Twitter said that the account was in fact linked to Identity Evropa, a white power fraternity.

Though Twitter referred to the group as Identity Evropa when discussing the account's removal, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) states that the group dissolved and reformed under the name the American Identitarian Movement, which it also calls a white supremacist group.
 Twitter said it had shut down other fake accounts linked to Identity Evropa, too. The phenomenon of people on the right creating fake Antifa accounts predates the current wave of protests. The takedown Monday is not the first time a fake Antifa account linked to white supremacists has been suspended by Twitter, the spokesperson confirmed.

Trump's Attacks on Twitter May Backfire

As Adolph Hitler rose to power, one of his first targets other than Jews were media outlets that reported the truth and refused to be propaganda arms of Hitler's Nazi Party.  Under Hitler confidant and sycophant Paul JosephGoebbels, the  Reich Minister of Propaganda gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany.  Newspapers and radio stations that failed to comply with Nazi Party dictates were vandalized, publishers arrested and put out of business.  Fast forward to 2020 and it is obvious that Donald Trump wants the same control over the media and seeks to silence any platform that exposes his endless lies and untruths. Trump's executive order signed yesterday - which is likely illegal - is a step in trying to silence social media platforms that have felt compelled to notate the untruthfulness of Trump's Twitter outbursts.  The irony is that by stripping them of limitations on liability for content, Trump may unwittingly be forcing them to be more vigorous in removing false content - something that would result in the opposite situation from what Trump wants: an unfettered platform to lie,  A piece in the New York Times looks at how Trump may have shot himself by his rash and tyrant like behavior.  Here are highlights:

President Trump, who built his political career on the power of a flame-throwing Twitter account, has now gone to war with Twitter, angered that it would presume to fact-check his messages. But the punishment he is threatening could force social media companies to crack down even more on customers just like Mr. Trump.

The executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday seeks to strip liability protection in certain cases for companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook for the content on their sites, meaning they could face legal jeopardy if they allowed false and defamatory posts. Without a liability shield, they presumably would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like [Trump's] the president’s.

That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. What he wants is to have the freedom to post anything he likes . . . . . Furious at what he called “censorship” — even though his messages were not in fact deleted — Mr. Trump is wielding the proposed executive order like a club to compel the company to back down.

It may not work even as intended. Plenty of lawyers quickly said on Thursday that he was claiming power to do something he does not have the power to do by essentially revising the interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the main law passed by Congress in 1996 to lay out the rules of the road for online media. Legal experts predicted such a move would be challenged and most likely struck down by the courts.

Mr. Trump’s order is intriguing because it attacks the very legal provision that has allowed him such latitude to publish with impunity a whole host of inflammatory, harassing and factually distorted messages that a media provider might feel compelled to take down if it were forced into the role of a publisher that faced the risk of legal liability rather than a distributor that does not.

“Ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230,” said Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which instantly objected to the proposed order. “If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats.”

Mr. Trump has long posted false and disparaging messages to his 80 million followers on Twitter, disregarding complaints about their accuracy or fairness.

[S]ome government officials said his plan was unenforceable. “This does not work,” Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the F.C.C. first appointed under President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “Social media can be frustrating. But an executive order that would turn the Federal Communications Commission into the president’s speech police is not the answer. It’s time for those in Washington to speak up for the First Amendment. History won’t be kind to silence.”

Even some conservatives objected, warning that the president was handing control of the internet to the “administrative state” and creating a bonanza for liberal trial lawyers to go after unpopular speakers traditionally filtered out by the mainstream media — including those like Mr. Trump himself.

The Communications Decency Act was passed during the dawn of the modern information age, intended at first to make it easier for online sites run by early pioneer companies like Prodigy and AOL to block pornography even when it is constitutional without running afoul of legal challenges.

By terming such sites as distributors rather than publishers, Section 230 gave them important immunity from lawsuits. Over time, the law became the guarantor of a rollicking, almost no-holds-barred internet by letting sites set rules for what is and is not allowed without being liable for everything posted by visitors, as opposed to a newspaper, which is responsible for whatever it publishes.

Mr. Trump may face an uphill road with his order. Daphne Keller, who teaches at Stanford Law School and has written extensively on internet law and regulation, said the order appeared to be “95 percent political rhetoric and theater that doesn’t have legal effect and is inconsistent with what the courts have said.”

However, Ms. Keller, who worked as an associate general counsel at Google for 10 years, said that even if the order did not carry legal weight, it may still be challenged because it was potentially an abuse of power that could violate the First Amendment rights of the companies.

Der Trumpenführer to Sign Executive Order on Social Media Companies,

The day after Twitter felt compelled to attach a warning to some of Donald Trump's tweets containing gross falsehoods (to thereby prompt readers to fact-check Trump's claims), much like a (i) petulant self-absorbed child or (ii) banana  republic dictator, Donald Trump claims he will sign an executive order likely punishing social media companies that resist giving a platform for his lies and deliberately false propaganda.  Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany (who is severely challenged herself when it comes to truth and veracity) confirmed Trump's intentions to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida. Trump's threatened action confirms that he sees himself as a monarch accountable to no one.  In reality, questions remain as to what Trump can realistically do to get revenge on those who will not disseminate his lies.   CNN Business looks at the controversy:

Donald Trump threatened to "regulate" or even "close" down social media platforms in a series of tweets over the last day after Twitter added a fact-check label to some of his posts. But Trump's options for cracking down on Twitter and other platforms over how they moderate their platforms are somewhat limited, legal experts say.

The options at Trump's disposal could range from pushing for new legislation to pressuring US regulators to sue the companies, none of which are guaranteed to accomplish what the president is threatening to do. The most "obvious" course of action would be for Trump to seek changes to the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech platforms from legal liability for a wide range of online content, according to Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
 There has been an ongoing push, led by the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress, to do just that. But changing the law would require building broad consensus in a deadlocked Congress. The Trump administration could not go it alone. And a new law that specifies how tech companies must police their platforms could raise questions about the law's constitutionality. 

Trump could pressure agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission to take action against social media companies. But the agencies have previously resisted efforts by the White House to transform them into arbiters of political speech, with officials privately voicing opposition to a draft executive order that experts at the time said tested the limits of agency jurisdiction. The FCC regulates phone and broadband infrastructure, said Schwartzman, and lacks much jurisdiction over Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) in the first place. Schwartzman said one way Trump could seek to "harass" social media companies would be to pressure the FCC to deny those companies licenses for unrelated experiments involving satellite internet or wireless spectrum. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has considered establishing a White House commission to study allegations of conservative bias. But that only underscores the limits of Trump's direct influence on the matter.
 Despite the limitations, growing tensions with the White House could still be perceived as a threat to the companies. Twitter and Facebook saw their shares dip on Wednesday on a day when the overall market was up.

Others argue that Trump should be allowed to lie and show his true self, but that argument forgets that a wide swath of the public lacks the knowledge - dare I say, intelligence - recognize the level of the untruthfulness.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case of allowing Trump to hang himself.  Here are excerpts:

Timothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.

Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one.

[U]nder Twitter’s ordinary terms of service, the platform would not only remove the tweets but also perhaps even Trump himself; some people have advocated for just that. But the president, like any world leader — except more so, with his 80 million followers — is no ordinary tweeter. The argument over what to do about Trump on Twitter is a subset of the larger debate about how to treat his outbursts and falsehoods, in particular whether the media becomes complicit simply by presenting them to a wider public. Thus, stretching back to the 2016 campaign, there has been vigorous debate over whether and how to cover Trump’s misinformation- and venom-filled campaign rallies. [B]ut I would argue that shining sunlight on Trump’s idiocy is the best disinfectant. Let the public witness him in his full glory and make its own judgment about whether he deserves a second term. Combine that with real-time chyrons and commentary calling out his falsehoods.

That is what Twitter usefully and appropriately did Tuesday when it appended a fact check to another set of Trump tweets about the supposed dangers of voting by mail. Twitter should do the same with Trump’s tweets about Scarborough

The fundamental problem isn’t Twitter — it’s Trump. He shouldn’t be de-platformed, but he must be defeated.

Twitter: Belatedly Refusing to Be A Platform for Trump's Lies?

I have a real problem with the news media - and by extension, social media - when it allows itself to be a platform for outright lies and untruths. The news media does this when it reports lies by Trump and other Republicans and never indicates that the statements are demonstrably untrue.  Sadly, the phenomenon is part of the news media's false equivalency mindset that fails to protect the public from blatant untruths and which helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.  Social media has become as irresponsible as Facebook regularly allows the publication of falsehoods.  And then there is Twitter which is Trump's favorite means of spreading lies and falsehoods - or at least until now when Twitter took the step of  added information to refute the lies and inaccuracies in Trump’s tweets for the first time.  If Twitter wants to be responsible, it will need to continue the practice and add such warnings to the vast majority of Trump's tweets.   The New York Times looks at what happened and will hopefully continue to be applied to Trump and others who deliberately disseminate lies and untruths.  Here are story excerpts (in the interest of full disclosure, I have a Twitter account I never use since I prefer this blog as a platform):

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time on Tuesday, after years of pressure over its inaction on his false and threatening posts.

The social media company added links late Tuesday to two of Mr. Trump’s tweets in which he had posted about mail-in ballots and falsely claimed that they would cause the November presidential election to be “rigged.”

The links — which were in blue lettering at the bottom of the posts and punctuated by an exclamation mark — urged people to “get the facts” about voting by mail. Clicking on the links led to a CNN story that said Mr. Trump’s claims were unsubstantiated and to a list of bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies.

The warning labels were a minor addition to Mr. Trump’s tweets, but they represented a big shift in how Twitter deals with [Trump] the president.

For years, the San Francisco company has faced criticism over Mr. Trump’s posts on his most favored social media platform, which he has used to bully, cajole and spread falsehoods. But Twitter has repeatedly said that the president’s messages did not violate its terms of service and that while Mr. Trump may have skirted the line of what was accepted under its rules, he never crossed it.

That changed Tuesday after a fierce backlash over tweets that Mr. Trump had posted about Lori Klausutis, a young woman who died in 2001 from complications of an undiagnosed heart condition while working for Joe Scarborough, a Florida congressman at the time. As part of his long-running feud with Mr. Scarborough, a host for MSNBC, Mr. Trump had posted false conspiracy theories about Ms. Klausutis’s death in recent days suggesting that Mr. Scarborough was involved.

Early Tuesday, a letter from the widower of Ms. Klausutis addressed to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, became public. In it, Timothy Klausutis asked Twitter to delete Mr. Trump’s tweets about his late wife, calling them “horrifying lies.”

Twitter said it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements” were causing the Klausutis family, but said that it would not remove Mr. Trump’s tweets because they did not violate its policies. Instead, the company added warning labels to other messages posted by the president on Tuesday, where he claimed the mail-in ballots themselves would be illegally printed.

The changes immediately set off accusations by Mr. Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, and his 2020 re-election campaign that the company was biased against him.

A Twitter spokesman said Mr. Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context.”

Disinformation experts said Twitter’s move indicated how social media platforms that had once declared themselves neutral were increasingly having to abandon that stance.
“This is the first time that Twitter has done something that has in some small way attempted to rein in the president,” said Tiffany C. Li, a visiting professor at Boston University School of Law. “There’s been a gradual shift in the way that Twitter has treated content moderation. You see them taking on more of their duty and responsibility to create a healthy online speech environment.”

Twitter faces singular pressure because it is Mr. Trump’s most frequently used method of communicating with the public.

But by doing nothing, Twitter was also being “misguided,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, who studies disinformation. “If world leaders are not kept to the same standard as everyone else, they wield more power to harass, defame and silence others.”

[L]ast October, Mr. Dorsey said the company would ban all political ads from the service because they presented challenges to civic discourse, “all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.” He worried such ads had “significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”

Twitter is not the only tech company struggling with moderating Mr. Trump’s threats and falsehoods online. Over the past few days, Mr. Trump posted identical comments about Ms. Klausutis’s death on Facebook. One of his posts there gained about 4,000 comments and 2,000 shares and was not mentioned by Mr. Klausutis. On Twitter, that same post, which questioned whether Mr. Scarborough had gotten away with murder, was shared 31,000 times and received 23,000 replies.

Until this week, Twitter had maintained that Mr. Trump did not violate its policies and that the company would take action if he crossed the line.

“We believe it’s important that the world sees how global leaders think and how they act. And we think the conversation that ensues around that is critical,” Mr. Dorsey said in an interview with HuffPost last year. If Mr. Trump posted something that violated Twitter’s policies, Mr. Dorsey added, “we’d certainly talk about it.”

 On Tuesday, the company turned that talk into action.

If Twitter wanted to be truly responsible, it would suspend Trump's account and bar him from creating a new one.  

Senate Report Shows the Scale of Russia's Efforts to Elect Trump

Even as Der Trumpenführer continues to rant (and likely lie - a view held by 62% of Americans) that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives, a new bipartisan study set to be released by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee shows the massive scale of Russian efforts to see Trump elected in 2016.  The efforts used every aspect of social media and sought to stir up "conservatives" - I'd call them racists and religious extremists - and to depress the vote of likely anti-Trump voters.  Countless individuals on the right (many of whom view themselves as "real Americans" and patriots) were duped into sharing Russian originated posts and links and, in effect worked as unwitting agents of Russian intelligence who played their prejudices and bigotry like a fine violin. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the report.  Here are excerpts: 

A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office.

The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel hasn’t said whether it endorses the findings. It plans to release it publicly along with another study later this week.

The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts.

“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”

Democrats and Republicans on the panel previously studied the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 finding that Moscow aimed to assist Trump, and in July, they said investigators had come to the correct conclusion.

The Russians aimed particular energy at activating conservatives on issues such as gun rights and immigration, while sapping the political clout of left-leaning African American voters by undermining their faith in elections and spreading misleading information about how to vote. Many other groups — Latinos, Muslims, Christians, gay men and women, liberals, Southerners, veterans — got at least some attention from Russians operating thousands of social media accounts.

The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.

The authors, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted the companies' “belated and uncoordinated response” to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, their failure to share more with investigators.

The report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses to political discourse within nations and among them, warning that companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and elsewhere are now threats to democracy. . . . “Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the report said.

Researchers also noted that the data includes evidence of sloppiness by the Russians that could have led to earlier detection, including the use of Russia’s currency, the ruble, to buy ads and Russian phone numbers for contact information. The operatives also left behind technical signatures in computerized logs, such as Internet addresses in St. Petersburg, where the IRA was based.

Facebook was particularly effective at targeting conservatives and African Americans, the report found. More than 99 percent of all engagement — meaning likes, shares and other reactions — came from 20 Facebook pages controlled by the IRA [a Russian intelligence agency], including “Being Patriotic,” “Heart of Texas,” “Blacktivist” and “Army of Jesus.”

Making the Case: Without Russia, Trump Wouldn’t Have Won

A piece in the Washington Post makes an argument that might drive the malignant narcissist in the White House to have an aneurysm or heart attack were it to come to his attention (I won't speculate if that would be a good thing or a bad thing - readers can draw their own conclusions).  The thrust of the column?  The bottom line is that but for the actions of Russian hackers and Russian derived fake news, Donald Trump would not be in the White House. For an individual who can never admit his own failings and whose ego is insatiable, the premise of the article goes to his apparent core as an egomaniac and insufferable liar and braggart.  Yet, if you read the full piece it is hard to refute - notwithstanding GOP talking points, lies and attacks on "sour grapes" Democrats - that it is probably correct in its conclusion.  But for Putin/Russia, Clinton would now be in the White House and the ongoing national nightmare would not be happening.  Here are column highlights:

President Trump is willing, under duress, to briefly and begrudgingly admit that Russian “meddling” took place in 2016 before reverting to calling it a “big hoax.” But he always maintains that the plot against America had no impact; he describes it as a “Democrat excuse for losing the ’16 Election.” Faithfully echoing the president, other Republicans, such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), say it’s “clear” that the Russian interference “didn’t have a material effect on our elections.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even claims that the U.S. intelligence community reached that conclusion.

Not quite. Here is the intelligence community’s assessment, partially declassified in January 2017: “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.” When then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo claimed last fall that “the intelligence community's assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” his own agency rebuked him.

[O]utside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state. [W]e know its propaganda reached 126 million people via Facebook alone. A BuzzFeed analysis found that fake news stories on Facebook generated more social engagement in the last three months of the campaign than did legitimate articles: The “20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.” Almost all of this “fake news” was either started or spread by Russian bots, . . . Elsewhere on social media, tens of thousands of Russian bots spread pro-Trump messages on Twitter, which has already notified about 1.4 million users that they interacted with Russian accounts. The Russian disinformation, propagating hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison and #MAGA, reflected what the Trump campaign was saying. Russia also hacked voting systems in at least 39 states, and while there is no evidence that vote tallies were changed, Russians may have used the stolen data to target their social media or shared the results with the Trump campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that “in a small number of states” the Russians may have been able to “alter or delete voter registration data,” potentially disenfranchising Clinton voters. And then there was the crucial impact of the Russian hacks of Democratic documents disseminated primarily by WikiLeaks.

The first tranche of stolen documents — more than 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments — was strategically released on July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic convention. The second tranche of stolen documents was released on Oct. 7, just 29 minutes after The Post reported on the “Access Hollywood” videotape in which Trump is heard boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. A third release of stolen emails, on Oct. 11, revealed that Democratic operative Donna Brazile, while working at CNN, had provided debate questions to Clinton during the primaries and that senior Democratic operatives, who were themselves Catholics, had exchanged emails disparaging Republicans who cherry-picked their faith for political gain. This fueled Trump’s narrative that the election was “rigged” and that the “Clinton team” was, as he said, “viciously attacking Catholics and Evangelicals.” The latter charge, unfair as it was, proved especially important in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — swing states with lots of Catholic voters. Now, by contrast, Trump and his apologists pretend that the Russian intervention — including the WikiLeaks revelations — was no big deal. That beggars belief. Even if the Russians had failed, they still attacked our democracy. Yet they didn’t fail: Trump won. Watts concludes: “Without the Russian influence effort, I believe Trump would not have even been within striking distance of Clinton on Election Day.” That is the inconvenient truth the Putin Republicans won’t admit.

We are truly living a real life version of a spy thriller where the White House has been co-opted by a hostile foreign power.

Americans Helped Spread Russian "GOP" Propaganda

Conway re-tweeted Russian Internet troll lies as did Donald, Jr., and numerous right wing "news" sites

One lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign as more information comes out about the lengths Russia used social messaging via Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to influence voters and throw those open to bigotry, homophobia and, of course white supremacy towards the Trump campaign is how gullible some Americans were and how they actively spread the Russia sourced lies and propaganda.  I still suspect that Russia had inside help from as yet unidentified Americans in designing their fake accounts and targeting susceptible demographics.   That said, frighteningly, far too many Americans - including right wing "news sites" like Fox News, the Daily Caller and Breitbart not to mention a number of Trump campaign officials - were only happy to believe the lies and further circulate them by re-posting and sharing them.  Indeed, I have Facebook "friends" (who I will not name, but hope will recognize themselves and change their behavior) who time and time again forward, re-post and share fake news, at least some of which appears to have been authored by Russian operatives in Moscow or St, Petersburg, Russia.  BuzzFeed reports on this disturbing co-opting of Americans to undermine American democracy.  Here are story highlights:

A popular, divisive Twitter account, purporting to be the work of Tennessee Republicans but allegedly the creation of Russian trolls to sow division in the US, was repeatedly cited in multiple articles by many prominent US news sites.

The Tennessee Republican Party flagged the account, @TEN_GOP, to Twitter, saying it was a fake, but it wasn't until 11 months after the first notification that the social media company "permanently suspended" the account.

By then, however, the site's inflammatory tweets had reached not only its more than 136,000 followers, but thousands of other people through retweets and references by some of the most prominent sites and personalities on the internet.

The account's purported Russian roots were revealed this week by Russia's RBC news outlet in an investigation that identified @TEN_GOP as one of dozens of accounts created by the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” whose work was aimed at sowing division online.

A BuzzFeed News survey of major American news sites showed just how wildly successful the account had been in injecting a divisive voice into US media, even after the 2016 election.

@TEN_GOP's tweets were used by Fox News to illustrate conservative reaction to minor news events, including the controversy that a writer for Saturday Night Live created when she referred on Twitter to Donald Trump's youngest son, Barron, as "this country's first homeschool shooter." Fox News Insider wrote that conservatives were outraged by the joke, citing five tweets, including that of @TEN_GOP.

In other cases, outlets seemed to base entire articles around sentiments expressed by @TEN_GOP. In March, Breitbart wrote about purported bias at Politico in an examination of that publication's description of the process by which Trump and Barack Obama had selected federal judges. It embedded an @TEN_GOP tweet to bolster its case.

All told, the account was quoted dozens of times across conservative news outlets. Fox News quoted an @TEN_GOP tweet in at least three stories, including one syndicated by the Daily Caller. The Daily Caller itself quoted it in six stories. Breitbart mentioned it in seven; Infowars in four; RedState in eight.

The Gateway Pundit, another conservative outlet, cited the Russian account in 19 different stories, . . . The account's tweets often derided African-Americans, Muslims, and immigrants.

The account became so prominent that a Daily Beast investigation found that some of the highest profile members of Trump's campaign endorsed it.

Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, Trump digital director Brad Parscale, and Trump son Donald Jr. all retweeted @TEN_GOP in the weeks leading up to the election.

Longtime Trump friend Roger Stone also retweeted the account, as did Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser before resigning amid reports he'd lied about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.  

Did Jared Kushner's Data Operation Assist Russians?

Paul Manafort may be indicted any day now, Facebook has been served with search warrants for specific foreign owned - read Russian - accounts and questions grow as to how Russians could so specifically target their anti-Hillary posts and fake news that sought to push voters to the Trump campaign.  One possible source of assistance to the Russians receiving growing scrutiny is Jared Kushner's data operation he created to assist in Der Trumpenführer's campaign efforts.  If this can be proven, obviously the charges that the campaign colluded with Russians who were in effect giving illegal contributions to the campaign, pretty boy Prince Jared could find himself in very serious trouble.   A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the growing focus on Kushner and his data operation.  Here are highlights:

The headlines were about Facebook admitting it had sold ad space to Russian groups trying to sway the 2016 presidential campaign. But investigators shrugged: they’d known or assumed for months that Facebook, as well as Twitter and other social-media platforms, were a tool used in the Kremlin’s campaign. “The only thing that’s surprising is that more revelations like this haven’t come out sooner,” said Congressman Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “And I expect that more will.”

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics?

“By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election.

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.”

Senator Martin Heinrich is leading the charge to update American election laws so that the origins of political ads on social media are at least as transparent as those on TV and in print. Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, is also part of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is tracing Russia’s 2016 tactics. “Paul Manafort made an awful lot of money coming up with a game plan for how Russian interests could be pushed in Western countries and Western elections,” Heinrich said, . . . . . “Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of this campaign. If there is a person who I think is very sophisticated in this stuff, and runs in pretty dicey circles, that is the place where I would dig.”

(Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. . . . . And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”

Will Zuckerberg, Facebook, Twitter and Others Face Robert Mueller’s Wrath?

A thought provoking piece at Vanity Fair looks at the role that Facebook, Twitter and social media more generally played in Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Among other things, it raises the question of why no one at these companies noticed the suspicious activities of foreign agents. Facebook can follow my shopping habits, but it did notice the buying activities of agents working in Moscow?  With Robert Mueller now having secured search warrants of some of the suspicious foreign accounts, one cannot help but hope that changes will be made to stop anything like this from happening again in the future.  Ditto for hate groups using the platforms to spread hate, bigotry and intolerance. Here are highlights from the piece:

Twenty thousand six hundred and fifty-eight. That’s a pretty big number, especially when you consider that it’s the number of people who are currently employed by Facebook. Those 20,000 employees include insanely smart people with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and M.I.T., many of whom spend their days toiling away on various revenue products, particularly in advertising-technology features—or ad tech, as it’s known in the industry—that helped the company generate some $27.6 billion in total revenue last year.

So why is it that none of those employees noticed that Russian operatives were using Facebook to manipulate the U.S. electoral process? And why is it—months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and after deadly protests in Charlottesville—that those workers allowed organizations to buy ads on the platform targeting people who searched for phrases such as “Jew haters”?

This ad-targeting mess has quickly become the Exxon Valdez of the Internet. Google, for its part, has 72,053 employees, many of whom are also working on smart algorithms to improve the company’s ad revenue, which accounts for 88 percent of its income. And yet, on Friday, BuzzFeed reported that Google allows groups to target ads toward people searching for racist phrases. So when people type in search queries like “Jewish parasite,” “black people ruin everything,” or “the evil Jew,” ads can potentially be served next to those keywords, and Google makes money off the transaction. The Daily Beast, meanwhile, also reported that Twitter allows people to target users on the platform who use the n-word and other putrid, disgusting, racist terms.

Since the election (and even leading up to it), it’s become abundantly clear that social media presented itself as a profoundly useful tool for the Russians, extremists, and possibly even people within the Trump campaign, to potentially disfigure our electoral process. Before Trump co-opted the term “fake news” to describe entirely accurate, if unfavorable, stories about him, real fake news was being created and proliferated at scale. Algorithms on Facebook didn’t work to try to stop this from happening, but rather to ensure that these fake stories landed right on the digital doorsteps of the people who might find them most interesting, and who might change their votes as a result of that content. Twitter’s problem with political bots has existed for as long as I can remember.

This might seem harmless on some level, but these accounts had been disseminating incredibly divisive (and oftentimes fake) stories about Brexit, Ukraine, and Syria, plus anti-immigration articles from outlets like Breitbart and excessively schismatic articles from the Daily Mail. The researcher also found that these accounts only tweeted between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Moscow time, and only during the week—almost as if it were someone’s job in Russia to do so. The accounts have tens of thousands of followers, and the suspected propagandists behind them stoked the flames of dissent by creating far-left bots which would go after Trump and his supporters.

Of course people are going to try to manipulate these technologies. The larger issue, however, is that these enormous, profoundly wealthy companies aren’t doing enough to stop them, and are not being held accountable. (Twitter and Facebook have attempted to crackdown on trolls in some ways since the election.) Curiously, Wall Street, which still remains oddly buoyant in the Trump era (it’s amazing what the rich will sacrifice for tax reform) is not chastising Silicon Valley for the extensive role it played in the mess we find ourselves in today. Facebook is worth $491 billion, despite months’ worth of news stories indicating it allowed Russian accounts to buy and target pages and ads on its network during the election, which estimates say could have reached 70 million Americans. Twitter’s stock, while bumpy, has barely moved since news definitively broke about all of the “fake Americans” that Russia created and operated on the social network during the election.

There are also reports that there is now a “red-hot” focus on social media by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election. But in both of these instances, there needs to be real consequences. It doesn’t take 20,000 employees to see the apathy and neglect these platforms have played, and continue to play, in the attacks against democracy by the people who want to see it fall.

National Review Eviscerates Donald Trump's Candidacy

On a less disturbing note - although it demonstrates how insane the Republican Party has become - the National Review (hardly a liberal outlet) is carrying a piece that utterly eviscerates Donald Trump and his narcissistic campaign circus.  Reports now are out that trump paid actors $50 a piece to attend his so-called campaign announcement.  Here are column highlights:

Donald Trump may be the man America needs. Having been through four bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula is uniquely positioned to lead the most indebted organization in the history of the human race.

The Trump conglomerate is the Argentina of limited-liability companies, having been in bankruptcy as recently as 2009. To be sure, a lot of companies went bankrupt around then. The Trump gang went bankrupt in 2004, too, and in 2001. Before that, Trump was in bankruptcy court back in 1991 when his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City — the nation’s first casino-cum-strip-club, an aesthetic crime against humanity that is tacky by the standards of Atlantic City — turned out to be such a loser that Trump could not make his debt payments.

Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at Trump Plaza, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?

On the substance, Trump is — how to put it gently? Oh, why bother! — an ass. Not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity.

Trump’s is a fill-in-the-blanks agenda: He claims to have a plan for defeating ISIS, but he cannot say what it is for reasons of operational security for the mission that exists only in his mind. He assures us the plan is “foolproof,” but whoever coined that word had never met a fool like Donald Trump. Immigration? Build a wall and force the Mexicans to pay for it.

We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency, I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures.

The problem with messiah complexes is that there’s no way to know whether you are going to rise on the third day unless somebody crucifies you. Trump has announced, and I say we get started on that.

If the above hasn't made you laugh enough, check out Cher's twitter comments on "The Donald" here.

Employee Reprimanded For Facebook Post

The question has been posed as to where exactly do our personal social media rights stand in light of our employer’s right and/or desire to know and their ability to dictate what goes on our personal Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or YouTube accounts accessed on our own private personal time. The question is relevant because many employers – particularly in states like Virginia which is an employment at will state where employees can be fired for no reason at all – need little or no justification to fire an employee as long as it doesn’t run afoul of prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other statutory protected class. A recent event brings this issue into focus. In this instance an Associated Press reporter was reprimanded over an innocuous comment on his Facebook page. Fortunately, as a union member, his union has come to his defense. Most of us do not have that luxury in an increasingly non-unionized work force.
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True, all of us as American citizens have our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. This protection does not, however, extend to private employers where contract rights govern relationships as opposed to prohibitions against government actions to restrict speech. While censoring employees’ rights to freedom of speech is in my view morally wrong, the reality is that this type of behavior happens virtually every day. In my own case, a letter to the editor in opposition to anti-gay legislation in 2004 likely set the stage for my being forced out of a law firm where the powers that be were more worried about not offending ultra conservative clients than the rights of their employees as citizens of an allegedly free country. Or the rights of LGBT citizens.
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The consequence is that employees need to use caution in what they post and how much they reveal. Unless you are self-employed or own your own business, it’s important to know the mindset of your employer and act accordingly assuming that anything you write may well be seen by your employer. I am not arguing that any of this is right, but it is a legal reality. Here are some highlights from Wired.com on the AP reporter case and others like it:
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Richard Richtmyer, a Philadelphia-based newsman, set off Tuesday’s tempest with a seemingly harmless comment posted to his Facebook profile late last month criticizing the executive management of newspaper publisher McClatchy, whose stock plummeted following a 2006 acquisition of San Jose-based Knight Ridder. “It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters,” Richtmyer wrote on May 28. “But they aren’t.”
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McClatchy, like countless other newspaper publishers, happens to be a member of the AP’s newsgathering cooperative. Had the comment been uttered in real life, it likely would have dissipated into the rank air of a Philly journo bar. But Richtmyer had some 51 AP colleagues as Facebook friends, some of them higher up in the AP food chain. One turned out to be a “mole” — Richtmyer’s description — and the reporter was given a firm talking-to by AP management, who put a reprimand letter in his employment file.
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The minidrama is an increasingly familiar one as companies and workers navigate the landscape defined by sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Firings and reprimands over postings to social networking sites have become commonplace over the last year.
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A stadium employee with the Philadelphia Eagles was fired in March after a Facebook post calling the team “retarded” for trading a star player. A North Carolina teacher was suspended in November for posting on Facebook, “I hate my students.” Three Harrison, New York, police officers were suspended in February after making untoward Facebook comments about their mayor.
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And two New Jersey restaurant workers are now suing their former boss after they were fired for their rumblings about the restaurant management on MySpace. The federal suit accuses the manager of logging onto the online discussion using another employee’s credentials.
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Private-sector workers have little, if any, protection from being fired or reprimanded for what they say online or off, said Wendy Seltzer, a First Amendment lawyer at American University. “If you put it onto a Twitter stream or a Facebook page, if they get word of that, they can fire you,” Seltzer said. “Electronic communications are more persistent, and more likely to find their way into the boss’ hands.”

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Federal employees, she said, generally have a First Amendment protection against being fired for their speech, unless it “impedes the ability to do the job,” Seltzer said.

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As is often the case with the law, what is legally permissible and what is morally right are two different things. Employees need to remember this unfortunate reality.