Russia's troll army?

[deirdre]

"Anything of value from a foreign national",

if you click that twitter link, the first response shows what the Mueller report says about it.

 

[Stefan Leahu]

As far as the russian trolls fueling conspiracy theories worldwide, I'm inclined to say yes. Of course, that's just done to muddy up the waters and as an exercise to see how many people are gullible to what kind of conspiracy theories. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/russian-trolls-spread-baseless-conspiracy-theories-like . I think BBC ran a report as well.

Thing is, as far as I can tell in Romania (eastern Europe), the facebook groups for flat earth, mud flood and other stuff like that seem to be organized and 'curated' by a handful of people and they have sprung up in a relatively short window of time of at most a few months. When you try debunking in those groups, it becomes clear early on that those guys are different from the usual tinfoil crowd. You can actually have logical discussions going in the group, but those guys will try to steer them away either using technobabble, or by starting the mudslinging to the point that it becomes a flame war and under no circumstance do they ever engage in scientific debunking. When approached by PM, they do not respond, which is very different from the 'normal' ones which are actually very passionate about discussing their pet theories. On the same part, you can have discussions that get way out of hand with insults, and no one gets banned, but you will almost instantly get banned for posting cold hard evidence that directly contradicts their narrative. Their time online is also dubious. It takes hours to days to get responses from the regular people. These guys never miss a posting, except if it's very late at night or something like that.

That's not necessarily to say that we're dealing with THE russian trolls, except that, as a former communist country, we have a long history of Russia trying to meddle in our politics and society and at the very least the leading Socialist Party (former communists) has a troll team, so it's hard to see how this may not be Russian interference.

 

[SR1419]

Seems like they had a (t)roll in pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy as well...

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News.

Content from external source

https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-the-true-origins-of-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-a-yahoo-news-investigation-100000831.html

 

[scombrid]

Zerohedge picked this up back in February:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-07/yes-democrats-did-start-ku-klux-klan-and-its-still-party-racism

It is commentary trying to brand the Democrats as still being the kkk party, pointing at people like George Wallace and the distribution of the congressional vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It seems odd to me that a financial news outlet would engage in this kind of muck-raking distortion of history unless it has some other agenda.

 

[Mick West]

Zerohedge picked this up back in February:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-07/yes-democrats-did-start-ku-klux-klan-and-its-still-party-racism

It is commentary trying to brand the Democrats as still being the kkk party, pointing at people like George Wallace and the distribution of the congressional vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It seems odd to me that a financial news outlet would engage in this kind of muck-raking distortion of history unless it has some other agenda.

Rational Wiki suggests that Zero Hedge is part of the problem:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

Zero Hedge is a batshit insane Austrian school finance blog run by two pseudonymous founders who post articles under the name "Tyler Durden," after the character from Fight Club. It's essentially apocalypse porn. It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions.[citation NOT needed]

Tyler claims to be a "believer in a sweeping conspiracy that casts the alumni of Goldman Sachs as a powerful cabal at the helm of U.S. policy, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve colluding to preserve the status quo." While this is not an entirely unreasonable statement of the problem,[1] his solution actually mirrors the antagonist in Fight Club: Tyler wants, per Austrian school ideas, to lead a catastrophic market crash in order to destroy banking institutions and bring back "real" free market capitalism.[2]

Content from external source

 

[Greylandra]

Rational Wiki suggests that Zero Hedge is part of the problem:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

Zero Hedge is a batshit insane Austrian school finance blog run by two pseudonymous founders who post articles under the name "Tyler Durden," after the character from Fight Club. It's essentially apocalypse porn. It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions.[citation NOT needed]

Tyler claims to be a "believer in a sweeping conspiracy that casts the alumni of Goldman Sachs as a powerful cabal at the helm of U.S. policy, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve colluding to preserve the status quo." While this is not an entirely unreasonable statement of the problem,[1] his solution actually mirrors the antagonist in Fight Club: Tyler wants, per Austrian school ideas, to lead a catastrophic market crash in order to destroy banking institutions and bring back "real" free market capitalism.[2]

Content from external source

Not going to bother "debunking" the specific claims within the article itself? Just 3rd party ad hominem from rational wiki... "zerohedge is a batshit insane..." Personally, I couldn't debunk the article either. :/ it seems grounded in: dates, names, places and facts in general.

 

[scombrid]

It wasn't the facts included that made the article bunk. It was the omission of 5-decades of facts in order to manufacture a conclusion that is bunk. It completely ignored the schism in the Democrat party that started at the 1948 convention and came to a boil in 1964 and ultimately resulted in >90% of the "George Wallaces" leaving the party by the 1980s. My question about why a financial periodical would re-post a political hit piece still stands.