• Democrat tech experts "orchestrated false flag operation" in Alabama Senate race
    19 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html
As sad as I am to say it, this is still illegal interference and it has to be treated accordingly.
Considering this was not for the Midterms, it looks like Democrats did not embrace that shady as hell strategy.
It’s only okay for the right to do this.
It doesn't appear to have been illegal or covered up. We already have a much more disturbing trend of shadow PACs that are created dump tens of millions in spending and disband before they have to report their financials. This seems somewhat unethical but not illegal and certainly it helps to study how these things work in order to better detect them.
The interaction between the digital world and politics has been a disaster
Seems to be no different than yellow journalism during the Gilded Age, though only more extreme and potentially more damaging. The practices and goals are the same, it's only the means that have changed.
It's shady as fuck, but I'm pretty sure it's not against the law. Not to say that it shouldn't be.
Doesnt matter if you're blue, red, purple, or florecent pink. This sort of subversion of democratic systems is wildly hazardous to everyone in the nation and people who do it need to barred from public office permenantly. There's no excuse.
Yellow is also harder to do as a hostile external agent.
the interaction between the real world and politics hasn't been great either.
I'm kind of curious how anyone could be offended by rudolf?
There's something about integration, visibility, and free access to information that should have empowered the average citizen to be more rational and conscious, eating away at that historic trend of democracies to be guided by an elite. But, it has just led to a lot of conflict that's difficult to escape. At the same time, it's passed a lot of control over to a few giants that dominate media as an industry. It's also become a new battlefield for rival powers in the world. The other guy brought up yellow journalism in the Gilded Age and it reminds me. People forget how the Hearst press set an example for the Goebbels propaganda machine. Maybe it's not just the internet, but mass media in general that has done more harm than good.
Not Rudolf specifically but his treatment is how I usually hear about it. That it's a bad children's tale because it teaches them 'if people think you're shit, you've earned it because you're not a useful cog. but if you become useful and choose to become a cog, then everybody will love you and the bullies will get shut down'. It's really just a story about 'if you don't stand out, you deserve to be crushed'.
this surprise is a result of an optimistic belief in some inherent homo economicus-like rationality in humans and their choice of data, hoping that when more is available they will try and take the best. this concept of a rational human is very likely a convenient myth, a thing that is becoming clearer as research in the fields of psychology, sociology, and neuroscience deepens in its scope and findings. as one can now easily see, that is simply not the case, and playing into the irrational heuristics characterizing human cognition is only becoming easier, not harder. the marketplace of ideas is no different from the supermarket: people can, and likely will, buy products that aren't very good for them. and people can, and likely will, market such products to the best of their ability.
I can't help but wonder if the introduction of social psych into core school curriculum might help improve the average person's ability to defend themselves against manipulation.
to an extent, probably. i'd argue that such education is becoming absolutely necessary for modern democracies to function better than they currently do, and that failing to do so is irresponsible.
Why would our government ever want to do that?
This is extremely interesting. We need a government that is willing to take steps to make these type of cyber influence campaigns less effective, because as time goes on it'll only get worse. Reading the article, the tone doesn't really make this out to be illegal. Especially considering the fact that there's no evidence Senator Jones even knew about this. Wouldn't be surprised to see that these tactics were used else where since then by all sides.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/facebook-suspends-5-accounts-inauthentic-behavior-during-alabama-special-election-n951276
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