Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier

[Fulcrum]

[QUOTE=sgman91;52818687]Can you cite this claim, please? I know the intelligence agencies agree that Russia tried to influence the election, but I haven't seen any such agreement that the influence played a large role in Trump's victory.[/QUOTE]

I think the issue here will be vague quantification. Large will mean whatever you want it will mean, which likely means "sufficiently high for it to be untrue"

regardless here's a [URL="https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf"]paper[/URL] from a standford economics dude, I'm not expecting you to read all of it nor take its conclusions at face value value it does contain some nuggets which might be helpful to us.I do this appeal to authority because if the evidence found in his sources is sufficient for him (an academic professional) then it's likely good enough for us (unless you can offer better information from a better source)

[quote]Recent evidence shows that:
1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016);
2) the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories (Silverman 2016);
3) many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016);
4) the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (Silverman 2016).[/quote]

Thats the first page, next few pages are embellishing those points.

other points of interest:
page 222 - distribution methods of fake news, mainly social media, search engine and direct browsing. (just for interest, though it does show how "new media" and fake news have both adapted better to modern internet than tradition media and MSM)

page 223 -
14% (according to a bbc poll this goes to 28% of young people) of people see social media as their primary news outlet (note this doesn't exclude others from being influenced by social media or influenced by friends and family who are in turn influecned by social media). Worth noting also that MSM outlets like fox news entertainment also spread fake news.

page 223 -
regarding partisanship of fake news (specifically with most of it being targetted at republicans) (possibly because the [URL="http://www.wired.co.uk/article/fake-news-macedonia"]authors[/URL] identified republicans as being more susceptible)

page 228 -
observing differences between dems and republicans regarding propensity to believe fake news.
(after testing both groups with different headlines)
[quote]
This suggests that Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to correctly believe articles
that were true (p = 0.124). These results suggest that in our data, Republicans were
not generally worse at inference: instead, they tended to be more credulous of both
true and false articles. Of course, it is possible that this is simply an artifact of how
different respondents interpreted the survey design. For example, it could be that
Republicans tended to expect a higher share of true headlines in our survey, and
thus were less discerning.[/quote] (for context)

[quote]
...

Given that our survey included a large proportion of fake articles that Republicans
were less likely to recognize as false, Democrats are overall more likely to correctly
identify true versus false articles.
[/quote]
Note isn't explained by the larger volume of fake news targetted at republicans since these were controlled tests using controlled news samples.

So fake news is widespread, it had significant exposure and reach, the target demographic (republicans) is more likely to consume it. all that remains is whether or not it had a big influence.

Now I'll give you an out since you're such a nice fella:
You might say that those people were already going to vote for trump and they only consumed/shared fake news because it was congruent with their world view, with fake news affirming misplaced beliefs or stances which they already held.
In which case: SAD!

Also as a side note, Hillary got the popular vote so the fake news only needed to have an effect on the electoral college. So I guess we could pick some at random and see, in detail, if they were affected by fake news. I had a go with this but [URL="https://twitter.com/jonellefulmer?lang=en"]yikes[/URL] and [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Evans"]I guess this guys clean, his motivation clearly wasn't fake news[/URL] and the rest of them are surprisingly hard to find/stalk/dox.

[Sableye]

I'm shocked that in the midst of the most vitriolic campaign in modern history that the dnc and clinton would pay someone to investigate their opponent! lock her up, maga!

If it isn't clear, i'm not shocked, I thought it was pretty obvious they were paid by someone in the DNC, the russia false flag thing seemed to only be parroted from right wing sites

[isak]

This isn't even news, we've known about this since the moment the dossier appeared. Steele was an ex-MI6 agent who was hired by the DNC to investigate Trump's financial ties to Russia to use as campaign ammunition. He just uncovered a hell of a lot more than people bargained for.

He wasn't paid to make things up, he was paid to find information, and he reported on what information he was able to find. Just because someone (or some group) you dislike paid for some information doesn't mean the information is fabricated. Why the fuck would the DNC [I]pay[/I] an ex-spy to make up fake info when they could just make it up themselves?

[Zero-Point]

[QUOTE=.Isak.;52820226]This isn't even news, we've known about this since the moment the dossier appeared. Steele was an ex-MI6 agent who was hired by the DNC to investigate Trump's financial ties to Russia to use as campaign ammunition. He just uncovered a hell of a lot more than people bargained for.

He wasn't paid to make things up, he was paid to find information, and he reported on what information he was able to find. Just because someone (or some group) you dislike paid for some information doesn't mean the information is fabricated. Why the fuck would the DNC [I]pay[/I] an ex-spy to make up fake info when they could just make it up themselves?[/QUOTE]

Some might argue that having an "ex-spy" come up with said info would make it sound more convincing, but those sorts have already butt-chugged the Kool-aid to the point that there's no reasoning with them.
See, when Trump Jr. went to talk to the Russians about potential dirt on Hillary Clinton gained from illegally hacked emails and such, that was just "opposition research".
But once the Dems donate resources to aid in the investigation of possible collusion and just finding dirt on their opposition in general, and getting more than they bargained for? Why, that's nothing short of a witch-hunt! D: