The Washington Post reports that propaganda experts have concluded that Russian operatives were behind many of the “fake news” stories that depicted Hillary Clinton in a negative light. The Russian government was eager to be helpful to Donald Trump.
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign…
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.
The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)
This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.
This propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-Trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign. Researchers from both groups traced a variety of other false stories — fake reports of a coup launched at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and stories about how the United States was going to conduct a military attack and blame it on Russia — to Russian propaganda efforts.
The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win, researchers said.
“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
So Vladimir Putin selected the President of the United States. Scary stuff.
One correction for the story above (from me): The term “useful idiots” was coined during the early Soviet era to describe starry-eyed liberals who naively supported the Soviet Union because they believed Soviet propaganda, and ignored or didn’t know what they did to crush dissent and murder or exile their opposition.
This story is extraordinary because in the past century, Republicans were hardline anti-Communists. Now, the Russians favor the Republicans and the president-elect looks on former KGB agent Putin as a good friend. Joe McCarthy must be rolling in his grave.
Americans have been flooded with fantasy, falsehoods and fake news by the Lame Stream Media since the 80s. They don’t need any help from the Russians.
What fake news are we talking about? If it’s CNN MSNBC and the rest of the mainstream maffia then I agree. I mean these are the outlets that proclaimed Hillary was 96% certain to become our next President.
Bingo, along with NYT, WSJ, Faux News, and the rest of the “popular” media.
Hey, you do realize that PropOrNot’s Russian Propaganda/useful idiots list contains legitimate sources of news, like Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism, Dr. Greger’s Nutritionfacts (a pro vegan site, bizarrely listed), and perhaps others (I can’t vouch them all), along with sources that are so painfully obvious white supremacist or conspiracy theory sites, effectively slandering AND blacklisting legitimate sources?
Do you also realize that by running this article on your blog with little no context you are effectively contributing to the blacklisting of legitimate sources like Naked Capitalism, et al?
List in question:
http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html?m=1
Update: I also just noticed that truth-out.org and blackagendareport.com are also listed, therefore blacklisted
Joey,
I didn’t create the list, the Washington Post. If the list is wrong, the news outlets should contact the writer at the Post. I have no control over what a national newspaper writes.
But you do have control over what you publish here. If you read the article, see that PropOrNot was given anonymity, look up propornot on google, you’d realize that there’s something fishy here. They even have an allies list that’s basically a who’s who of NATO/Atlantic council/CIA cutout sources. They even have a chrome extension that “identifies Russian propaganda” that works similarly to that Neo Nazi extension that identifies Jews by triple parentheses like (((this))), except it uses triple Y like YYYthisYYY.
10min of work, tops, to discover these facts. 20min tops to add it into your post.
What you did here is signal boost the smear & blacklist without doing the bare minimum of research and adding context. You ought to take responsibility for that. Luckily over on Twitter there’s a firestorm raging over this. PropOrNot probably played their hand far too soon to be effective, and everything might blow over beyond a few bruised egos — egos that have every right to be hostile to this.
Joey V.,
In some cases, when a story comes from a dubious source, I double check before posting. When I am posting an article from the Washington Post or the New York Times, I do not check their sources because they are highly reputable. The outlets that feel they were defamed have a problem with the Washington Post, not me. Probably half a million people read the story in the Post, as well as journalists across the nation. Maybe 20,000 people read it here.
Joey’s outrage seems a bit over the top. The website cited by the Post story clearly states that its “criteria is behavioral” and that “they are at the very least acting as bona-fide ‘useful idiots’ of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.” It does not make blanket accusations and, if anything, encourages them to do some investigation on why their sites register on behavioral criteria. I’m sure their uncertainty must be equal to Joey’s certainty. After all, stories about websites being compromised and hacked are daily occurrences. And we all know vegans are likely commies deep down. Relax, Joey, in case you missed it, that last line was a joke.
This is not our GOP. This is something else.
When did red baiting become the past time of Democrats? I don’t like Trump either, but quite frankly, I became very concerned when I began hearing what sounded like McCarthyism coming from the Hillary camp.
Bad things happen. It doesn’t mean there’s a Russky behind every corner.
Yikes. I meant “pastime.”
The Russians made me do a grammar mistake.
Gayenah,
News! The Russians are no longer “reds” or Communist. Russia is an oligarchy, led by a tyrant who kills his opposition and journalists. All Putin’s friends have become billionaires.
Is that not where the USA might go? What do you think?
The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
See more on how the buzzy fake news gets circulated and amplified at mathbabe’s blog
post-news. Truth is irrelevant
People believed these posts, Russian or wherever.
I HOPE that Jill Stine gets her 2 million or whatever she needs for a look at the 3 states in question.
Greg Palast has info, credible info I believe, that Hillary had lost before a vote was counted because of shenanigans.
Maybe, maybe not
but
Al Gore should have won according to Palast also.
and
look at where our country is now – post George/ W.
Jill Stein has gotten enough money to ask for a recount in all three states. This could get interesting.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/green-party-candidate-jill-stein-file-vote-recount/story?id=43746839
Jill Stein has now raised $5 million to pay for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
I wish she had dropped out and endorsed Hillary.
Well, Diane, I wish that THETrumpster and THEHillary would have both dropped out.
Ahhh, If wishes were only kisses and fishes, eh!
A little late for Jill Stein to be campaigning for Hillary.
I wish Jill Stein had dropped out a week before the election and endorsed Hillary rather than continuing to attack her. We might have been spared this national nightmare.
I doubt it would have mattered in the states in question. Who was considering voting for either Jill Stein or Trump? Completely different types of people voted for the two sides.
I think that to the extent this is a vote distribution analysis, it involves how many Stein voters would have voted for Clinton if they couldn’t vote for Stein.
Diane and All: I am re-reading some of my highlighted sections from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (renewed publication: 1975). It’s like reading a “Putin-Trump Playbook.” Here are four quotes (there are so many, it’s hard to choose) from the chapters on totalitarian propaganda, movement, and in-power.
(1) “Propaganda is not ‘the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses'” (361).
(2) The horrible methods of “mature” totalitarianism, like (quoting Hitler) killing those that are not “fit to live” and ought to be “eliminated without much ado” like the incurably sick, Jews, the “dying classes,” are
“foolproof only after the movements have seized power. . . . Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” (p. 350)
The gist of the above section is that the totalitarian is “the greatest” and will “do the greatest things;” (none of which can be proven or dis-proven) and so sets out doing so by denying, denegrating, and destroying all of the evidence and competition that would prove otherwise. The totalitarian speaks the language of a nonscientific science and makes for himself a “retrospective alibi.” The death of truth, or in today’s language, the emergence of a post-truth universe. And “those who are not in my camp are worthless anyway” (Hitler 1939) (note on p. 361).
(3) “. . . what convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ ‘inferior’ capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time. . . . What the masses refuse to recognize is the fortuitousness that pervades the reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency. . . . Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.” (p. 352)
(4) “Their art consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experiences. With such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and strictness of the organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies–the power of the Jews after their helpless slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky. . . . The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick, and, at least in the case of Stalin, cannot be explained by the psychology of the liar whose very success may make him his own last victim . . . ” (p. 362) END
Catherine, I reread this book while the Republican convention was in Cleveland. Here’s an observation I wrote in my notes:
The 2016 Republican convention, especially when viewed through the propagandistic lens of Fox News (our friends outside of the U.S. really would have a hard time understanding how this can exist and thrive in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”), provided a Petri dish-like environment to examine how leaders with totalitarian tendencies control their “fellow-travelers.” Compare some of her observations with what we witnessed in Cleveland; how the members of the movement with “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism” are “expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” Or how the fellow-travelers “had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything or nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true” and “how its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd.”
GregB: And what is your point?
GregB Afterthought: The book is well-researched with quotes from Goebbels’ diary and Hitler’s speeches. The chapters are literally peppered with not only chilling similarities but exactly-the-same word-for-word then-and-now statements. It should be required reading for all Trump followers; but also for those Republicans who are now responsible for running interference for a fascist movement–or stopping it in its tracks.
What surprises me (probably not everyone here) is why many on the democratic side of things couldn’t see the signs and take steps before and during the campaign (rather than just saying “never Trump”), as things “matured,” to speak to its weaknesses.
It’s still not a given–unforeseen things occur and people change with certain types of realizations; but if Arendt’s work has anything to say to us now, it’s that all of the pieces are certainly in place for a perfect storm to occur according to the more generalized origins of totalitarianism and its implementation.
I guess an oligarchic mob-based kleptocracy run by a murderer celebrity-seeking dictator (Putin) is a one-up on a Hitler or a Stalin?
That the Cleveland convention had eerie similarities with fascist rallies in Europe, South America, and Africa. It seemed be run according to the playbook Arendt described.
GregB: Yes–thanks for replying. See my afterthoughts that crossed in the mail.
I’ve long had conflicted feelings about Arendt. She had a great ability of framing arguments–sometimes I appreciated her logical flow while disagreeing with her interpretations–but she was not particularly good about drawing conclusions or recommending solutions. Her biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruhl actually did a better job of defining her philosophical consistencies than she did (I have about 8 hours of Arendt’s lectures on cd and they can only be taken in small doses).
Interestingly, Isaiah Berlin, with whom one would expect she might have some affinity, didn’t respect or like her. I am more of a Berlin disciple, but he also could never form a coherent grand vision. While he would violently disagree, I think their writing complement and, in some ways, complete each other.
But despite their personal aversion and lack of respect for each other, taken together, between his backward-looking and her contemporary and forward seeking analyses, they provide a solid basis for what liberal thinking should be in our times. With respect to understanding fascism, I don’t think one can get a complete picture about the challenges are without reading them both.
GregB: though I didn’t read a lot of Berlin, from what I did read, I also see the relationship. I don’t assume sexism on Berlin’s part for his aversion to Arendt but, considering the time period, it’s always a question. It would be interesting to know why that aversion. But surely, these or writers with similar messages are a set of missing pieces in the educational background of way too many who are involved in the present debacle.
Berlin’s antipathy for Arendt wasn’t sexist, it was cultural. Here’s a good article that explains some reasons: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/some-remarks-on-isaiah-berlin
Isn’t it a huge cause of concern that our election process was so heavily influenced by foreign sources? And that the president elect who benefitted from the foreign propaganda is refusing to acknowledge and deal with conflict of interests that will (not “could”) arise from multiple business interests around the globe?
To gitapik: A “huge cause of concern.” Contact and tell your Congressional representatives.
And now for something completely fake!
Fakety-fake-fake Fakefakefake!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/laura-ingraham-lifezette.html?client=safari
The most interesting aspect of the WP story is “two teams of independent researchers”
No names. Am I the only one questioning this? https://www.occupycorporatism.com/how-the-ndaa-allows-us-gov-to-use-propaganda-against-americans/
Clarity, the names were listed in the article.
My bad, Diane.
Clint Watts http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1zJ3Sphm3RsJ:docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA18/20160623/105126/HHRG-114-FA18-Bio-WattsC-20160623.pdf+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Aaron Weisburdhttps://wikispooks.com/wiki/Internet_Haganah
J.M. Berger https://www.youtube.com/user/JMBerger
Berger outlines social media’s ability to develop emotional relationships as he speaks about lone wolf attacks…..
He addresses resources as if the United States is underfunded in this battle.
Mainstream Media provides an abundance of propaganda. According to my earlier link, “”Four billion dollars per year is spent by the Pentagon on propaganda aimed at the American public; ”
From my link in my previous post regarding the 2012 repeal of the Smith Mundt Act “According to Michael Hastings : “The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”
More questions need to be asked and a far better job on true and independent research performed.
Did you question why the article is listed in the WP’s “Business” section?
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/
Wow, Diane
Did you even do a simple Google search of propornot or war on the rocks before you ran this? They’re start up blogs. As soon as i read this article i started looking into it and looking for reactions because the reporting here wouldn’t pass an editor’s desk at most colleges … yours is the first response I’ve seen that remotely takes this article seriously. Perhaps you should start looking at WaPo’s and NYT’s sources, despite their “stellar” reputations
Benjamin,
I don’t do due diligence on the New York Times and the Washington Post. They are reputable sources in themselves because their reporters are experienced, and their editors are careful. A story like this one doesn’t get published without fact-checking.
It took me about ten minutes of googling to discover how bogus the sources in this story were – then I spent about a hour scratching my head about how this story got published – then I started looking up reactions and virtually ever response was either incredulous or laughing – then i came across your blog, which is actually has more validity than PropOrNot’s, and you bought it, hook, line, and sinker – if your going to express an opinion on an investigative piece don’t skimp on the due diligence