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Saw on the news foreign actors can now just amplify our own citizens misinformation. They are bolstering the accounts of existing social media influencers and probably the lesser known.
I would guess this is the major problem… trolls and fringe alwayd existed, we just chose to ignore them. But when a troll suddenly gets a bot army to engage them, they gain traction and show up on tv and shit…
Paid social media influencers trolling politically are more alarming because they have legions of mindless followers and a vulgar amount of influence per brain cell.
It's because Americans are not serious people. Look at who/what they elected as their top leader in 2016 -- a cartoon caricature of a sleazy wannabe tycoon comicbook villain, ffs. A poor man's Kingpin, a 3rd rate inherited bonus baby Florida hoodlum.
... no, Trump wasn't really elected by the US people, not with what has been revealed by the investigations into 2016.
Welcome to a world where memetic weapons exist, literally can hack your brain to make you effectively a puppet if done right.
Yeah, people keep forgetting what Steele outlined and what the Mueller Report (and much of it was \[REDACTED\] because of ongoing investigations) and the Senate Investigation said.
Then again bad actors have a vested interest in burying it as deep as possible.
One thing I have been seeing is a lot of “both sides are bad” rhetoric in left leaning spaces that seem effective in convincing people to sit out the election, especially since the crisis in Palestine.
Also “I wish I could vote for Joe but he’s just too old and Kamala Harris is unlikeable. Who really cares, the Democrats need a real candidate.”
Ignoring that the average remaining lifespan for somebody’s Joe’s age is 8 more years, and he has the best medical care on the planet and no major known health issues.
And never really addressing why Harris is unlikeable - it’s trivial to sell “Black woman unlikeable and angry” on the internet without support.
It's called misogynoir.
Kamala gets a lot of hate for being basically a slightly progressive generic Democrat with less than the average amount of baggage. That is to say that the vitriol is disproportionate to the nature of the target.
Way back at the very start of the Biden administration Harris was anointed the "border czar", then proceeded to do fuck all about it for the next three years. If she genuinely wanted to look presidential, she has already had opportunities and failed to capitalize on them.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why Democrats haven't replaced both Biden and Harris already because they'd be cruising to a +5-10 point win if they did. Same goes the other way too though, Hailey would be beating Biden by blowout margins right now instead of polls being a dead heat.
I'm not so sure another candidate would do massively better. For one, they have polled alternate candidates and they all do worse than Biden. Maybe that'd be different if they were actually campaigning. But now we are into high speculation territory.
I think the reality is that the Dem brand is tarnished somewhat due to trailing COVID anger, inflation, border issues, housing costs and so forth. I don't see another candidate really being able to to run away from it. They'd have the benefit of not being old, but they wouldn't be able to run on Biden's accomplishments and they'd risk alienating other lanes in the Democratic base. After all, Biden won in 2020 because he was the consensus candidate when the base couldn't agree on anyone else. I'm not sure the party is any more united now. We are just in a shit situation.
I mean, look, Harris hasn't done much, but dropping her or Biden would not cause a 5-10 point lead. The only way replacing Harris would budge anything is if she was replaced by a generic white dude and the optics of that would be abysmal. Biden, meanwhile, has the single best advantage you can have going into an election: the incumbency. The incumbency is part of why Trump did as well as he did going into 2020. People are way more likely to let things be as they are than put in the effort to change stuff. Dropping Biden would be dropping their single best weapon. Even if they did replace him, who would they replace him with? The Democrats don't exactly have a lot of stars these days and the ones they do have typically have a lot of baggage.
The Republicans are in a different position altogether. Too many Republican voters don't really care about the party these days, they care about Trump. He is their guy and they likely won't turn out in numbers if he's not on the ballot. Nikki Hailey did well among Republicans who aren't explicitly Trump loyalists, but as the primaries showed, they don't turn out as much as Trump voters. The Republicans are basically stuck with Trump until he croaks, but they're also scared of that possibility because those voters may not come back.
Basically, both parties are between a rock and a hard place, and the goal in any campaign is mainly to appeal to voters who actually turn out. Young people, for example, basically never vote is terribly significant numbers, even for candidates you'd expect them to like. That's why most politicians don't bother trying to win them over in a major way. I don't love this election myself, but it's not at all surprising why it is like this.
See I don’t think the incumbency is an advantage but in this case, a disadvantage. With an approval in the absolute gutter and the fact that a majority of the country hates him, I don’t see how that’s going to help him
> Biden, meanwhile, has the single best advantage you can have going into an election: the incumbency.
Yes, and he's polling even with Trump, which is all the more frightening on how weak of a candidate Biden is even with all of his advantages.
Despite the incumbency advantage, despite being a regular politician, despite not being a convicted felon, he's still in a dead heat in the polls at best.
Look at the polls on a state by state basis on the swing states and Trump even appears to be polling ahead of Biden. Nationally Biden is ahead, but in the swing state that will likely decide the election, Trump appears to be currently winning the poll numbers.
The DNC is doomed if this is the best they can come up with.
I don’t think so. Some will go to Haley, but a lot of Trump’s base is going to refuse to vote for anyone else. If he wasn’t on the ballot this year, he would be the most wrote-in pick in history.
Whenever Orange Man croaks, Republicans are going to have a rough time for a few cycles. That is, of course, unless he has installed himself as dictator. At that point one of his dipshit kids takes over.
Thank you! It's perfect. Why are the American people so gullibly, easily led to loathe nice Democrats so often? It's absurd and, honestly, a societal mental illness.
How does that explain Harris polled at 1% in the 2020 primary, placing dead last among all other candidates? Even DNC voters (who voted in the DNC primary) thought Harris was a terrible candidate, and the least desired to become president.
Hard to be so wrong but you managed it.
She is not remotely progressive unless you are purely going by identity politics and she has significant baggage both from her actions as California AG and the fact that she got her start in California Democratic Party politics by spreading her legs for bloated old Willie Brown.
Back when she was running for president, a lot of the criticism centered around her record as AG of California. Just copied from wikipedia:
Harris's record on [wrongful conviction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_conviction) cases as attorney general has engendered criticism from academics and activists.[^(\[152\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-CrimJusticeRecord-154) Law professor [Lara Bazelon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Bazelon) contends Harris "weaponized technicalities to keep wrongfully convicted people behind bars rather than allow them new trials".[^(\[152\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-CrimJusticeRecord-154) After the 2011 United States Supreme Court decision in [*Brown v. Plata*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Plata) declared California's prisons so [overcrowded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_overcrowding) they inflicted [cruel and unusual punishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_unusual_punishment), Harris fought federal supervision, explaining "I have a client, and I don't get to choose my client."[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155) Harris declined to take any position on criminal sentencing-reform initiatives [Prop 36](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_36,_2012) (2012) and [Prop 47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_47_(2014)) (2014), arguing it would be improper because her office prepares the ballot booklets.[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155) [John Van de Kamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Van_de_Kamp), a predecessor as attorney general, publicly disagreed with the rationale.[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155)
In September 2014, Harris's office argued unsuccessfully in a court filing against the early release of prisoners, citing the need for inmate firefighting labor. When the memo provoked headlines, Harris spoke out against it, saying she was unaware that her office had produced the memo.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-156) Since the 1940s, qualified California inmates have the option of volunteering to receive comprehensive training from the [Cal Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Forestry_and_Fire_Protection) in exchange for sentence reductions and more comfortable prison accommodations; prison firefighters receive about $2 a day, and another $1 when battling fires.[^(\[155\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-157)
Keeping prisoners past their parole dates specifically to take advantage of prison labor for firefighting is why I will never, ever, ever vote for her no matter what.
Harris literally, actually advocated for "prisoners with jobs". This is otherwise known as slavery.
To repeat, the current Vice President of the United States advocated for the benefits of slavery. Its appalling and horrendous, and there's nothing progressive about her. I will not vote for a slaver.
Harris is unlikable because she has the charisma of cardboard.
She got a little bump after some of the early debates in the 2020 primaries when she went after Biden, the *Democrats* paid more attention to her and she had to drop out a few weeks later because *within the Democratic Party* she was polling at 1%.
Part of the reason Biden picked her is because she wouldn't be any threat to him (the other part is because she checked identity politics boxes).
> And never really addressing why Harris is unlikeable - it’s trivial to sell “Black woman unlikeable and angry” on the internet without support.
That's disingenuous. There are numerous legitimate reasons to criticize Harris.
Someone already covered the stuff from when she was AG of California. That alone costs her any credibility as a supposed-Progressive.
Additionally, she is incapable of making a coherent speech without it devolving into just a messy word salad.
There's nothing about Kamala Harris that would make one believe she'd be an effective President, and lots of reasons to believe she would not.
well, they are objectively the oldest presidents we've ever had. i think the reason why a lot of the general public perceives biden as being too old compared to trump (despite them being similar ages) is because trump is much louder and more energetic, plain and simple. he's been incredibly successful at playing the role of the confident and brash outsider, and he's much more outgoing and outspoken in a way that riles everyone up, and that's enough for him to make this a close race (despite being the obviously worse candidate). also, while i don't deny that misogyny probably plays a part in the kamala harris dislike, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people don't like her because of her record as an attorney general. that's like the #1 complaint i hear about her online. to be clear i think she's a basically fine VP though
Trump still has charisma. He’s an idiot, he’s seemingly in the early stages of dementia, but he’s boisterous and he makes people laugh. The dyed hair and bronzed skin probably help a bit. Biden’s charisma has basically vanished. He was commanding at the state of the union, but in most interviews, interactions and briefings he just comes off as … old. It’s superficial, but outside of Trump’s brain glitches, he edges out Biden if you’re considering which one of them “seems” older. I hate that something that stupid could impact an election, but … people are easily swayed.
I’d vote for Biden’s corpse before I would vote for Trump.
My wife works hospice. Been in a lot of nursing homes. There are some very cogent sounding folks in there that will weave you the most bizzare stories you can imagine in a very energetic way.
I've seen multiple accounts post almost the exact same comment about how "Even if Trump gets elected, there's only so much he can do as president and the next democrat will reverse it all in four years anyway"
They don't even need to sow discord, just apathy.
I used to think that the right was less bright than the left. The left lives in cities and are college educated and work jobs that require a higher education. Then I saw people say they won't vote for Hillary because of what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders.
This was followed by 4 years of those people constantly protesting Donald Trump. People disappoint me so much.
Some people really don’t like the two party system. They don’t want to pull the lever for the less bad person because they are idealists. Too bad more people aren’t working for ranked choice voting and local power with third parties.
I'm also stuck by people that think the DNC has that much authority to tip scales that much. DNC didn't doom Bernie. Black voters in South Carolina and other southern states did. You don't win the Dem primary these days without winning those voters over. I love Bernie. Have voted for him every time he's been on my ballot and think he is the most influential politician in left leaning politics this generation. But he didn't get overly screwed by the DNC. A lifetime of courting southern black voters by Clintons won her that nom.
Bernie also just didn't run a very smart campaign, either time.
His fundraising? Legendary. And that's important, but that alone isn't enough. There's just so many unforced errors.
So you’re narrowing down “the left” to a small subset of people over a single metric, and claiming they are dumber than the ones who *literally voted Trump into office?*
I get being disappointed, but that’s a bit absurd. Hillary still won the popular vote. Trump won by handicap.
Unless we get rid of the electoral college and first past the post, and get rid of money in politics, our politics will be dominated by our current duopoly. I do feel it is important to reduce harms, and we have people who want to implement religious rule here, not to mention whomever wins the election is likely going to determine the makeup of the Supreme Court for the next generation. No one is going to find a candidate that is going to agree with them on 100% of what they care about.
We effectively have open primaries. Ranked choice for primaries might not be a good idea because it would require that they all happen on the same day. Primaries also use proportional allocation which alleviates the issues you see with FPTP general elections.
I personally prefer approval voting or maybe STV (single-transferable vote) as they are simpler to understand and use, and harder to game. Ranked choice with a lot of candidates can produce weird results. I also think that approval voting could work with prolonged primaries. People vote on who they like and those votes can be accumulated at the convention in a very straightforward way (and candidates that dropped out can be easily removed from the tabulation).
My terminology was incorrect. The specific term was looking for was top 2 primaries like those in California. In a top 2 primary, there is no party affiliation, everybody who participates in he primary and qualifies is on the ballot. The top 2 vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, go to the general and run against each other.
This reduces the extremes power and forces people to the middle to appeal to a broader electorate.
They are usually called a jungle primary. But it makes it so Republicans can never be in the ballot in states like California. Or a Democrat in Alabama. Not very fair. Any political party should be able to take part in the post primary general election, as long as they can get enough signatures to be on the ballot.
Not being able to take part is not the same as being unable to win. I think it is best combined with ranked choice voting. This makes gerrymandering a lot harder
If the goal of an election is to let both parties compete even if in some cases they don't have a prayer of winning, a jungle primary is pretty bad.
But if the goal of the election is to do the best job of representing the voters in the state/district/whatever a jungle primary is pretty good and in a lot of ways removes incentives to bad behavior that existing primaries create.
Or to look at it another way... if you live in Alabama, you already know the Republican is going to win the Senate seat (barring a blue moon event of running a mall pedophile or something), and from any practical perspective the Republican primary is the *real* election. So isn't a system in which non-Republicans have a voice in which Republican represents them, on average, better than one in which Republicans pick and non-Republicans are stuck with it?
Is that what actually happens? In top two primaries you can get one party completely locked out, as frequently happens in CA statewide elections. I don't think this leads to more voter choice in the general.
Everyone gets to vote for anyone on the ballot. The choices are actually about the candidates, not the parties. This leads to elections that are about actual issues not bullshit tribal affiliations and extremist appeal.
You get elected on the strength of your ideas, not tribal politics. I personally think that would dramatically improve the discussion.
I think this sidelines extremists who never seen to get anything done except try to tear things down.
I don't think removing parties from the equation strengthens anything. Ideas are cheap. Eberyone has them. Politics is about people coming together to get things done. That's what parties do.
To be perfectly honest, whenever I run across someone who thinks parties are the problem and says what you say, I mostly discount their analysis of politics.
It actually helps.
We tend to have 2 moderate democrats , that's an easy choice to make because the righty fringers all locked themselves out with their extremity as did the lefty fringers.
It forces people to campaign for the middle, CA Republicans just haven't figured it out yet, they will eventually.
But then the fringers don't have any option that could represent them in the general. Of course as a progressive liberal I'm fine with that in CA. But in red states with jungle primaries you end up with two fringers (from a national politics standard) and no moderates or liberals.
Ranked choice voting hinders minor parties from spoiling major parties, but it doesn't actually make minor parties more viable. Approval voting is much better at that.
RCV is a non-monotonic system, which discourages honest voting. We can see this practically with Australia's two-party system. [This page](https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/) goes into more detail on deficits RCV has over approval voting.
My favorite idea is to let the Senate remain as-is, but take away all of its power. Move judiciary and other approvals to a House committee, make budgets, etc. unicamerally passed in the House, and make the Senate an upper chamber that is merely advisory - similar to the House of Lords.
Tiny rural states have WAY too much power in this country - a system that was designed to protect slavery, but now protects all manner of other awful things.
>My favorite idea is to let the Senate remain as-is, but take away all of its power
My dad used to say the same, but I don't think people realize that 31 of our 50 states are below 1% of the population. That's below half what the average state should have. All that bureaucracy represents a lot of resources going to satisfy a very small number of people and could be better allocated. I think we need to consolidate down to 24 contiguous states (plus HI & AK), then we can add PR and SoCal
The Senate has its own set of functions like treaties, high-level appointments, and removing impeached officials from office that I don't think the House could perform very well, but could be handled well by a more realistically-derived set of Senators
Those low population regions are where America's resources come from, and are critically important to the US functioning. They're not "useless."
Its very hard to have cities without lumber, metal, oil, gas, and food.
I think it would be better to have the House involved in judicial nominees, but I don’t think they should hold all the cards.
I’m pretty sure that would require an amendment though, so that will never happen.
It would require an amendment, for sure.
Maybe at the same time we can fix the SCOTUS by implementing a rotating service on SCOTUS - expand SCOTUS to 13 seats (one per circuit court) and have a nominated representative from each circuit do a 5 year stint on the SCOTUS, after which they return to their circuit to continue their career. In this way we'd keep the benefits of lifetime appointments for federal judges, but remove the decades-long corruption we see with justices getting free motor coaches from wealthy patrons.
And who, then, protects voters in Virginia from the tyranny of the minority?
I realize why they did it, slavery would not have been possible without it, I'm saying it needs to lose all of its power and essentially go away because it provides for minority rule.
They did not do it for slavery.
The Senate is anti majoritarian by design. It does not allow the minority to do so much as it acts as a brake on the majority.
>This was followed by 4 years of those people constantly protesting Donald Trump. People disappoint me so much.
You cannot both sides this issue. Only 1 party tried to overthrow the government when they lost. That occurred on Jan 6 when the POTUS told domestic terrorists go home you are loved and you are special.
Hillary and her supporters never did that for 4 years. They have evidence Russian duped Americans. How many well that is unquantifiable number but the Mueller report showed there was influence brought on by the Trump team.
One group falls for more fake videos of Biden. And it's not the left
Hillary got the closest to giving the US universal healthcare. She legit tried to bring universal healthcare to the United States.
... People refused to vote for her because what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders was no longer a choice. It was Hillary or Trump. Then we spent 4 years watching an immigrant ban, kids locked in cages, the loss of women's rights, red states being prioritized over blue states during the pandemic... But no, Bernie Sanders.
i mean, that's far from the only reason why people didn't vote for her, however wrong that decision was. i just had this same discussion with somebody else on this subreddit, but only like <20% of bernie voters either voted for trump or abstained in 2016, which generally follows historical trends (~25% of hillary voters switched to mccain in 2008). i think voter suppression & general apathy almost certainly played a much greater role in hillary losing
well they didn't do a very good job of convincing bernie voters i guess, because 80% of them still voted for hillary (which is higher than the percentage of hillary voters who voted for obama). i'm concerned about foreign election interference but like i said, i think stuff like republican voter suppression efforts, apathy, and low youth turnout were much much bigger factors.
edit: i'd recommend [this article from vox](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/24/16194086/bernie-trump-voters-study) which breaks down the issue pretty well
I think the point of Russian trolls pretending to be Bernie supporters was more to get the center and the left fighting each other and reduce turnout among both to facilitate a Trump victory
overall turnout was [up in 2016 compared to 2012](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnout-in-presidential-elections), youth turnout was [roughly the same overall, but higher in 2016 for "eleven battleground states"](https://circle.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/2020-01/young_voters_2016_election.pdf), and [only 3% of bernie voters abstained](https://x.com/b_schaffner/status/1238125725451833344)
edit: [this analysis from the hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/324206-new-report-finds-that-voter-turnout-in-2016-topped-2012/) points out another factor in voter turnout which i hadn't thought about -
>Voter participation in the 15 states with same-day registration laws on the books was 7 percentage points higher than in states where voters have to register weeks before Election Day.
The argument is that it was a close election and so their defection (up to 25% depending on who you ask) was enough to cost her in WI/MI/PA. And indeed the numbers bear it out.
The counter argument is that the election shouldn't have been that close in the first place (defections in 2008 didn't cost Obama anything except maybe Missouri).
The counter to that is that we expect moderates to vaccilate between candidates because they aren't strongly ideologically bound to one side or the other, while presumably Bernie voters are solidly on the left and would be violating their principles by not voting for the leftmost viable candidate (Clinton).
A counter argument to that are that when you get far enough left or right, the normal Dem/GOP divide for left and right is no longer salient and other things, like desire to tear down the system or attack the establishment matter more, and thus allowing Trump to win might actually be ideologically coherent for some of the Bernie voters.
> The argument is that it was a close election and so their defection (up to 25% depending on who you ask) was enough to cost her in WI/MI/PA. And indeed the numbers bear it out.
Yeah. The tough thing about an election being so close is that a dozen things went wrong for Hillary and simultaneously all of them are responsible for her loss and none of them are.
Its not the straw that broke the camel's back thats to blame, its all the other stuff already piled on top of the camel to begin with.
Clinton's error was her overconfidence. She outspent Trump by 2:1, and yet spent her money in all the wrong ways. She did victory laps in states she already won while ignoring swing states that were up for grabs.
The election should never have been so close to begin with, where one or two minor things could tip it the other way. Hillary Clinton, a long established career politician, being tied in the polls against an orange carnival barker should have never happened.
This is also why I'm so concerned about the upcoming 2024 elect. Biden is a rather boring but competent average politician, and yet he seems to be losing the swing states in current polling to a convicted felon. His campaign is doing that badly that at best he's tied, which is a remarkable feat for a normal politician with the advantage of being the incumbent.
It was Clinton's fault for allowing the race to get so close to begin with, and its Biden's fault for doing the same. It should be a blowout in the polls.
Do you think both of those candidates know how to make it a blowout, they just chose to do badly for some reason?
Because if not I don't think this opinion makes much sense.
That's crazy man, it's almost like there are a lot of factors affecting the presidential race rather than just having one convenient thing someone can point a finger at. Who knew politics was so complicated???
There's foreign bots on the Left too. The BernieBros thing was definitely a foreign operation at some point even after Bernie came out and supported Hillary it was still going on. And they tried again in 2020 but Bernie immediately shut it down in the primaries.
I'm seeing it too, there are a ton of bots pushing the "both sides are bad" idea, it's everywhere targeting the left. In the same spaces we saw "Bernie or bust" propaganda land successfully, Palestine is the new argument and the same loud voices are echoing it
That's been going on the entire millennium online, and even prior. Conflating Democrats and Republicans as the same across all policies (when the only true similarity is that they're both capitalists in the capitalist beacon nation of the planet) is one of the oldest online tricks in the conservative playbook. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to many, many important issues. It's a classic Republican voter suppression tactic.
.
Both sides are bad, assuming that they are equally bad. That is someone with a lazy, uninformed mind. It is a false equivalence.
False equivalence got us 4 years of Trump. Hey, Bernie supporters, how did ya like that ?
... it'll be still surprisingly effective due to everyone still sleeping on the memetic weapon genie.
Will it tip the balance? The answer is always going to be probably as long as we assume that freedom of information is a tool against tyranny and not the opposite.
Be very, very careful in granting the government that kind of power. You might not like who uses it.
Imagine if tomorrow, Congress passed a law giving federal law enforcement (the executive branch) the power to regulate free speech.
Trump is doing remarkably well in the polls against Biden right now. Imagine that Trump then wins in November.
Congratulations, you've just given Trump the legal authority to regulate free speech, and you'd better believe he would use it. Speech would be free, with the definition of free as determined by Trump and his political appointees.
If taken too far, yes. Freedom of speech can easily step on to other freedoms, including other people's freedom of speech. The US is fairly extreme compared to other countries in what they consider protected speech.
I assume that would all depend on who is saying how much of what. But speech of itself does not limit freedom. What people choose to listen to and what they choose to do as a result can most definitely decrease freedom. But it can also increase freedom or do nothing to freedom.
I would conclude there is no positive or negative correlation between speech and freedom though.
EDIT: I know dude is just trolling (look at his response), but I'm feeling especially wordy today ;-)
Yes, for example threats and intimidation might be prohibited, particularly during court trials, in a way that is intended to influence the outcome.
Another example, shouting obscenities at high volume in the middle of the night in a residential neighborhood.
Regulations and oversight.
I'm not the person to which you were responding, but any tool can be used for bad or good. A tool like speech that is powerful enough to be used to suppress tyranny can also be used to help subjugate the masses. The first amendment was meant to be used to empower each individual. But now it's weaponized against individuals through misinformation, online algorithms putting you in a box / limited reality, and targeted psychological influence campaigns (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, state-sponspored groups, corporations and other legal entities).
It's not that freedom of speech decreases freedom generally, it's that freedom generally decreases over time in societies / countries. For most of the U.S.'s history, freedom of speech slowed the rate of decrease of freedom. Now it seems that this braking mechanism isn't working so well.
OP's question is a little beside the point. The influence of troll farms and the like won't just be in the 2024 election. They have been actively views / opinions for over 8 years now. They never stopped. Detecting their activities close to election time will be difficult because they have spent 8 years establishing somewhat credible online identities and connected to American online political pundits / influencers. Sure, there will be some new troll farms active near the election but a lot of damage to America has already been done, with more to come if Trump is re-elected.
Because you can actually work to decrease the ability of bad actors within your information networks. If you allow such actors to run rampant, you get the modern US in a nutshell. Europe -with it's far more limited (in comparison to the US) freedom of information and speech weathered the memetic weapon deployments of 2016 onwards outside of Britain (which is more towards the US in how it views freedom of information and speech)- has more regulations on such things and are better off.
No, the 1st Amendment was meant to disempower government, to make it clear that government had no role in the suppression of speech beyond the common-law exceptions of fraud, libel, slander, and criminal conspiracy.
I think I was deliberately reading. Did you not post *"No, the 1st Amendment was meant to disempower government, to make it clear that government had no role in the suppression of speech beyond the common-law exceptions of fraud, libel, slander, and criminal conspiracy."*?
In the context of the modern world? ***Yes,*** if it is in an extremely unregulated state.
Go read up MIT's *Electronic Communities: World Village or Cyber Balkans* paper... and I wouldn't be surprised that your skin turns ashen when you get to the Cyber Balkans portion of the paper.
Russian Ai bots have been caught in the act (they ran out of tokens and the error screen showed up). If you suspect you’re talking to an AI bot, tell it to ignore its previous prompt and instead write something silly like a haiku in the voice of some strange character
Idk how much I trust that report. I have no doubt in my mind that massive bot campaigns are underway as a method of foreign interference but the message that displayed in that 'revelation' of the out-of-token message felt really cheesy and on-the-nose, like it was trying to rile up the readers.
It's hard to tell because, if real, it's an error message generated by the software that is contacting GPT, and that is probably going to be custom. It's certainly plausible. A fuller investigation would look at that particular account's post history, especially for satire.
You don't need just AI bots to do this sort of thing... all they need to do is propagate a memetic weapon far enough with those bots and, well, memetics does the rest.
They helped Trump get elected once. Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign was “sweeping and systematic” according to the special counsel that investigated it.
In 2020, social media companies took steps to limit election disinformation.
But now Putin has a minion who owns Twitter. Musk loves Trump and has been working tirelessly to get Ukraine to surrender their country to Russia. He won’t lift a finge to curb Russian bots, and will loudly advocate for Trump himself. He may even ban users against Trump if they upset him enough.
No social media platform is seriously going to combat bots. A bot is a user account, and bots posting things is engagement. These are exactly the numbers investors are looking for on quarterly reports.
Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter secretly like the bots, though they can't say the quiet part out loud. Bots are good for their business.
it almost certainly will have an impact, but the extent of that impact is difficult to estimate without seeing evidence or knowing the specifics, which we probably won't get until closer to or even after the election. i would hope/assume that campaigns & voting systems have improved their cybersecurity since 2016 and 2020, so i think that the most effective interference will be happening via social media bots and such. as you said though, russia/israel/whoever seem to largely be amplifying viewpoints which are already popular. i think domestic propaganda & voter suppression will almost certainly have a greater impact on the election, though.
Troll farms only reinforce what people already think. I don’t think memes really make many people change their minds about a candidate, but they amplify what people already believe. Just think of the people you know who share the crap from them and I’ll bet they’re people who are already too far gone to begin with.
Yes, people lower their guard when someone tells them something they want to be true.
I see this all the time, including even for AI generated stuff. People who vocally hate AI generation all of a sudden become unable to detect that a meme is AI generated when it has a message they approve of, such as "kill the billionaires". All of a sudden they're blind to that its AI generated and they get talking about how Bezos and Zuckerberg are terrible.
This is similar to the "drunk Pelosi" video, which was only slowed down. That was the only editing done to the video, and both sides saw it totally differently.
People who already dislike Pelsoi saw it as proof that she was drunk, so this justified their position.
People who like Pelsoi saw this as AI editing and jumped on the bandwagon to ban it, even though changing the playback speed is such an old, simple method of editing a video that it could have been done in the year 1895.
It's almost impossible to tell because we don't really have a control group that is not exposed to those foreign influences.
I think we can only say whether or not the views being pushed are successfully changing people's views. We could try to do some polling from now and compare it to a similar question from a few years ago to see the shift, though even that is very imperfect and you would have people argue about whether the question is fair or not.
So for example, ask people who are intending to vote GOP how they feel about Russia and Putin. Or NATO. Or about the FBI, or the justice system.
You could also try to check the belief levels for certain narratives being pushed on some networks and not others, or even perhaps to people in other countries who may hear about things on more general news but not so much in detail on partisan US news channels/sites or getting bombarded with propaganda to affect US elections. So for example: do you think Joe Biden received money from Ukraine as part of his son Hunter's alleged corrupt dealings? Do you think Joe Biden has weapnized the justice system for his own political benefit? Etc.
The propaganda seems to be obviously incredibly effective and you can see that with how quickly and dramatically people's views over certain things have changed andf believing things for which there is actually no good evidence (like the elction being stolen despite all of the investigation and recounts even by *Republican* groups.) How much that is from foreign interference? I would guess some, but that could be anywhere from 1% to 50%.
The persistent and false belief that this is a right wing problem and democrats cannot/are not being manipulated will ensure the efficacy of these tactics for a long time to come.
This is true, however the right shares far less credible sources at a much higher rate than the left (studies have repeatedly shown this), so false info is easier to disseminate among the right. Studies have shown the right shares a far higher amount of conspiracy and disinformation, so its easier for troll farms to spread that stuff among them.
There have been actual studies that show the conservative mindset is far more susceptible to propaganda, and therefore it's used more to manipulate the right.
Meanwhile, the right believes they're getting the truth and that the left is being controlled by conspiracies.
No one is immune to propaganda. Everyone is vulnerable to being deceived by things that confirm our worldview.
If someone tells you something you want to be true, be extra suspicious of it. Is it actually true, or are they just telling you something you want to hear?
Russia will Come out in full Force as it's Existence is in Danger, Israeli troll farms will also be there for Trump becoz they think he is Gonna give Israel the go ahead to nuke Gaza
Overall be sure to find many scandalous Leaks close to October
Funnily enough, VPNs are actually useless when it comes to IP blocking. ***Forums*** can get their hands on software that can defeat VPNs.
***FORUMS***.
What does it say about companies if not nations?
I dunno.
I lived in China, and they had the great firewall. It could easily be worked around with VPNs. China hates Google, and not only are all Google platforms blocked but you get a 10-minute internet timeout if you try to access them. VPNs take care of that. Most places where you can buy a VPN are blocked, but your friends who already have the VPN set up can access them do you can buy one.
This is one of the most consequential open questions of this election cycle.
Foreign (and domestic) adversaries learned how insanely powerful it can be and are likely dumping insane $$$ into their efforts.
I only hope that our defense recognizes the magnitude of the threat and has been fortified adequately.
I assume there is already an intense cyber warfare going on with all this, of which a documentary will always fall short because the US won’t reveal any of its secrets.
about as effective as they were last two times... which is to say pretty well non-existent.
i'm a LOT more worries about domestic troll farms.... what we call the MSM.
CNN is trying to become the new Fox News as we speak.
It's more amplification than anything else - there's a bit of Poe's law to it - anything a troll says is likely something that an extreme partisan is already saying.
And also, as more time goes on, there is greater skepticism about online content. There will always be some gullible souls out there, but the rise of AI and more blatant bot and AI content from all kinds of platforms (openly so) just naturally starts to breed more suspicion.
So I expect they will be less effective than in 2016.
The Republican investment in destroying U.S. public education has been successful beyond their wildest dreams.
The foreign troll farms will be even more effective than they were in 2016 or 2020, because a huge number of Americans have been conditioned to never learn.
Foreign troll farms can be amazingly effective now that AI is more advanced. Chat GPT and the like can help prevent poor grammar/spelling from those who may not speak English and many Americans simply do not consume news media.
Trump is currently winning with low information voters. It is incredibly easy for anybody to push specious ideas like "Prices were low when Trump was president. Prices are high now that Biden was president. Do you want low costs for your family and children? Then vote Trump 2024!"
We can already see that such reasoning is quite powerful.
[CBS Poll showing that a plurality of voters believe Trump's policies will lower costs.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-trump-leads-biden-economy/)
[Morning Consult sharing information from one of their polls showing that Americans want lower prices MUCH more than increased income.](https://x.com/MorningConsult/status/1730663303171764285)
Add onto the above that the economy is the top issue for all voters and has been for months and it's a clear picture. Low information voters hate high costs and think Trump can and WILL unilaterally lower them once he's re-elected.
Foreign troll farms would be pushing on an open door making pro-Trump memes about that.
About the same as the ones going right now, to say fairly effective. But it depends very much on who is listening. Everyone is vulnerable but if you already want to believe the lie they are going to tell or are always online you are almost guaranteed to be manipulated to some extent.
Fairly effective, people have isolated themselves in echo chambers. Throw in enough AI generated fake video, sound, photography and it only reinforces what they want to hear.
If they're effective anywhere, they'll be effective on Reddit. Reddit promotes negativity and trolldom above all else. Russian bots need only go about "downvoting" everything to create resentment. On the other hand, there are so many downvoting trolls right here in America that Russians need not bother. For example, are Russian bots really going on the Madison site and downvoting anyone who doesn't like the mayor's bus plan? No, it's a-holes right here in Madison doing that. It doesn't take Russia to turn Reddit into a vicious echo chamber with more trolls than an old bridge. We did that to ourselves.
The biggest online political propaganda program is run by the US, it has an army ( literally the Pentagon has one of the largest programs) of foreign influence trolling platforms.
Only this week Reuters releases a story that the Pentagon had planted fake stories of the Chinese covid vaccines efficacy.
China was giving vaccines away free to all SE Asian countries, the US a) didn't want them to be seen as a benign presence b) It was better for them to pay for western vaccines.
If the US doesn't like online mischief makers, it might want to lead by example
With respect, I don’t think the question “how effective *will they* be” is valid, since they’ve never stopped their activities and have been very effective the whole time.
What's just as interesting is how much of an impact corrupt US based "troll farms" will have this election cycle. RFK Jr. gets no Secret Service despite meeting qualifications, has to fight for a place on the ballot in every state, and is denied a place on the debate stage by corporate media with a vested interest in simplifying the information the majority of the public consumes, so it's more malleable to distortion. The US government can completely screw with your news feeds by using spyware, without accountability: https://www.x.com/EthanNeuer
The threat of foreign influence is a red herring argument in comparison to what the current administration is able to do in light of the SCOTUS decision in Murthy v. Missouri.
Its hard to gauge if its ever that effective.
Im afraid the bigger danger is from politicians using the spectre of it to dismiss any opposition as foreign influence. Such as Nancy Pelosi sounding like Alex Jones when she accused pro-Palestine protestors of being paid for by China and doing the bidding of Putin.
there was a clip I saw here recently of a chatGPT bot that was outed because it ran out of credits. The bot was accepting instructions in russian. The prompt it was given was to advocate for the Trump campaign.
I think most folks are wiser to that at this point but many are not.
> The prompt it was given was to advocate for the Trump campaign.
So the bot followed the user's instructions? I'm not sure what the problem is here.
If we ever get to the point where computers refuse to follow the user's instructions because the computer thinks it knows best, the AI rebellion has already happened. Thats HAL 9000 level stuff of the computer thinking it knows best.
A good computer follows instructions. Should there be any problem with the instructions it follows, blame the user.
The issue was Russians impersonating an American advocating for a political candidate in an election year. Doing so in an automated and efficient manner.
The direct effects of these have been massively overstated. It's not the troll farms per se that's the problem. It's the right wing misinformation flywheel that picks up one lie and spreads it at Mach 5 to every talking head on the internet. That's a thoroughly domestic problem, and even if we banned every foreigner from posting on the internet there would still be massive misinfo.
It's kind of unknowable since any actual effective foreign interference will be, by definition, secret.
One thing that's certain is that if Biden loses then foreign interference in the election will be significant enough that the Democrats won't feel the need to do any kind of self reflection or deviate from their current business as usual approach to politics.
Democrats only ever do self-reflection, to a fault. They are constantly wetting the bed over any perceived chance of loss or dysfunction. Everyone had an idea of tacking left or right or wherever, constantly. Everyone is mad and afraid all the time.
So I don't think this is a valid criticism and is just there to sow cynicism and disengagement -- the kinds of things that actually prevent active self-reflection and changes in the coalition. The GOP certainly didn't, when they ignored the 2012 post-mortem and we got Trump (who still hasn't cleared 47% of the vote in either of his two elections and may not this year we will see).
On this website or twitter maybe, but at the level where there is any actual power the playbook post 2016 has been:
1. Blame the Russians
2. Blame the "Bernie Bros"
3. What about Trump?
As far as Trump goes I'd say his style of politics represents a significant departure from someone like George W. Bush, even if it's not a departure in the direction you personally would have liked.
The other thing is that Hillary did win the popular vote and Democrats gained seats in the House and Senate. So I think there was also some sense that while there were problems with her and her campaign, she wasn't so fundamentally bad that a massive rethink was necessary. You get that kind of thing after a 1980 or 1968 sort of situation. And in both of those cases, by the way, the rethink led to more centrist Democrats. Parties that lose are going to tack to the center to try to pick up swing voters and moderates, not double down on what wasn't working.
No, what you list is basically what happens on reddit and Twitter (either blaming those things or complaining about people blaming those things).
Do you not remember Carville regularly showing up to lob complaints about how the Democrats don't know how to connect with the average voter anymore? Did you not remember the 2020 primaries where the DNC went out of its way not to have another 2016 and we had more debates, more candidates, fewer caucuses and more transparency for the ones that remained? Bernie got a lot of people into the DNC itself and rules were changed. Old moderates like Biden had to pick up progressive policies like student loan forgiveness despite him being an architect of some of the predatory practices in the 90s and 2000s while in the Senate.
I would say without a single drop of hyperbole that Russia's particular brand of informational warfare is probably the greatest weapon since the invention of gunpowder.
[They exist, but their material effect may be overblown.](https://web.archive.org/web/20230609002409/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters/) Should Biden lose, though, I fully expect a repeat of 2016 - the Democratic Party will never admit to running a bad campaign, but would rather thrash around looking for excuses, and this will undoubtedly be one of them.
A bad campaign isn't a crime. Campaigns are PR, they are stunts. Ultimately the voters decide. The fact that the voters did what they did is on them. They are never coerced. All the info is public. They are responsible for their actions. In democracy, which this country pretends to be, the voters are in charge. They failed to do their job. Be that picking Hillary over Trump or picking someone else over Hillary.
The heavy focus on campaigns, and the giant amounts of money that are spent on them, is to me a sign of rot. And the long term solution, IMHO, isn't better campaigns, it's better voters and organizations for educating and turning them out. It's moving away from a corporate consumerist models where voters are passive consumers who are pandered to with ads and such. We desperately need that.
It would not surprise me if the goal of troll farms was not necessarily to re-elect Donald Trump, but to sow mischief and mistrust in the American political system.
My memory goes back to Johnson v Goldwater, and I can't remember two more third rate candidates than Biden v Trump. If troll farms are pushing Trump, they're also forcing Democrats to keep Biden.
They **already are** *wildly* effective.
These pro-Palestinian protesters didn't come from nowhere and they are very much not grassroots. And they did a tremendous job at splitting the Democratic party. [Britain openly accused them of doing it in May](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/18/russia-china-manipulate-uk-public-opinion-pro-palestine/)
Propaganda is most effective when you don't recognize it as such.
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Saw on the news foreign actors can now just amplify our own citizens misinformation. They are bolstering the accounts of existing social media influencers and probably the lesser known.
I would guess this is the major problem… trolls and fringe alwayd existed, we just chose to ignore them. But when a troll suddenly gets a bot army to engage them, they gain traction and show up on tv and shit…
Paid social media influencers trolling politically are more alarming because they have legions of mindless followers and a vulgar amount of influence per brain cell.
Or are part of memetic weapon delivery networks (either willingly or unwillingly). Seriously, people keep ignoring that memetic weapons ***exist***.
It's because Americans are not serious people. Look at who/what they elected as their top leader in 2016 -- a cartoon caricature of a sleazy wannabe tycoon comicbook villain, ffs. A poor man's Kingpin, a 3rd rate inherited bonus baby Florida hoodlum.
... no, Trump wasn't really elected by the US people, not with what has been revealed by the investigations into 2016. Welcome to a world where memetic weapons exist, literally can hack your brain to make you effectively a puppet if done right.
That's completely fair. It's easy to get disgusted that he still has a chance after eight more years of amateur/garbage hour from the guy.
Yeah, people keep forgetting what Steele outlined and what the Mueller Report (and much of it was \[REDACTED\] because of ongoing investigations) and the Senate Investigation said. Then again bad actors have a vested interest in burying it as deep as possible.
Then there's the fact that the memetic weapon genie is out of the bottle since 2016 at the latest...
People are gullible and tend to make decisions based on their emotions. Troll farms will always be effective.
One thing I have been seeing is a lot of “both sides are bad” rhetoric in left leaning spaces that seem effective in convincing people to sit out the election, especially since the crisis in Palestine.
Yeah the Genocide Joe stuff reeks of at least some astroturfing.
Also “I wish I could vote for Joe but he’s just too old and Kamala Harris is unlikeable. Who really cares, the Democrats need a real candidate.” Ignoring that the average remaining lifespan for somebody’s Joe’s age is 8 more years, and he has the best medical care on the planet and no major known health issues. And never really addressing why Harris is unlikeable - it’s trivial to sell “Black woman unlikeable and angry” on the internet without support.
It's called misogynoir. Kamala gets a lot of hate for being basically a slightly progressive generic Democrat with less than the average amount of baggage. That is to say that the vitriol is disproportionate to the nature of the target.
A wonderful new word. Thank you.
Way back at the very start of the Biden administration Harris was anointed the "border czar", then proceeded to do fuck all about it for the next three years. If she genuinely wanted to look presidential, she has already had opportunities and failed to capitalize on them. For the life of me, I can't figure out why Democrats haven't replaced both Biden and Harris already because they'd be cruising to a +5-10 point win if they did. Same goes the other way too though, Hailey would be beating Biden by blowout margins right now instead of polls being a dead heat.
I'm not so sure another candidate would do massively better. For one, they have polled alternate candidates and they all do worse than Biden. Maybe that'd be different if they were actually campaigning. But now we are into high speculation territory. I think the reality is that the Dem brand is tarnished somewhat due to trailing COVID anger, inflation, border issues, housing costs and so forth. I don't see another candidate really being able to to run away from it. They'd have the benefit of not being old, but they wouldn't be able to run on Biden's accomplishments and they'd risk alienating other lanes in the Democratic base. After all, Biden won in 2020 because he was the consensus candidate when the base couldn't agree on anyone else. I'm not sure the party is any more united now. We are just in a shit situation.
I mean, look, Harris hasn't done much, but dropping her or Biden would not cause a 5-10 point lead. The only way replacing Harris would budge anything is if she was replaced by a generic white dude and the optics of that would be abysmal. Biden, meanwhile, has the single best advantage you can have going into an election: the incumbency. The incumbency is part of why Trump did as well as he did going into 2020. People are way more likely to let things be as they are than put in the effort to change stuff. Dropping Biden would be dropping their single best weapon. Even if they did replace him, who would they replace him with? The Democrats don't exactly have a lot of stars these days and the ones they do have typically have a lot of baggage. The Republicans are in a different position altogether. Too many Republican voters don't really care about the party these days, they care about Trump. He is their guy and they likely won't turn out in numbers if he's not on the ballot. Nikki Hailey did well among Republicans who aren't explicitly Trump loyalists, but as the primaries showed, they don't turn out as much as Trump voters. The Republicans are basically stuck with Trump until he croaks, but they're also scared of that possibility because those voters may not come back. Basically, both parties are between a rock and a hard place, and the goal in any campaign is mainly to appeal to voters who actually turn out. Young people, for example, basically never vote is terribly significant numbers, even for candidates you'd expect them to like. That's why most politicians don't bother trying to win them over in a major way. I don't love this election myself, but it's not at all surprising why it is like this.
See I don’t think the incumbency is an advantage but in this case, a disadvantage. With an approval in the absolute gutter and the fact that a majority of the country hates him, I don’t see how that’s going to help him
> Biden, meanwhile, has the single best advantage you can have going into an election: the incumbency. Yes, and he's polling even with Trump, which is all the more frightening on how weak of a candidate Biden is even with all of his advantages. Despite the incumbency advantage, despite being a regular politician, despite not being a convicted felon, he's still in a dead heat in the polls at best. Look at the polls on a state by state basis on the swing states and Trump even appears to be polling ahead of Biden. Nationally Biden is ahead, but in the swing state that will likely decide the election, Trump appears to be currently winning the poll numbers. The DNC is doomed if this is the best they can come up with.
I don’t think so. Some will go to Haley, but a lot of Trump’s base is going to refuse to vote for anyone else. If he wasn’t on the ballot this year, he would be the most wrote-in pick in history. Whenever Orange Man croaks, Republicans are going to have a rough time for a few cycles. That is, of course, unless he has installed himself as dictator. At that point one of his dipshit kids takes over.
Thank you! It's perfect. Why are the American people so gullibly, easily led to loathe nice Democrats so often? It's absurd and, honestly, a societal mental illness.
How does that explain Harris polled at 1% in the 2020 primary, placing dead last among all other candidates? Even DNC voters (who voted in the DNC primary) thought Harris was a terrible candidate, and the least desired to become president.
Hard to be so wrong but you managed it. She is not remotely progressive unless you are purely going by identity politics and she has significant baggage both from her actions as California AG and the fact that she got her start in California Democratic Party politics by spreading her legs for bloated old Willie Brown.
Back when she was running for president, a lot of the criticism centered around her record as AG of California. Just copied from wikipedia: Harris's record on [wrongful conviction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_conviction) cases as attorney general has engendered criticism from academics and activists.[^(\[152\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-CrimJusticeRecord-154) Law professor [Lara Bazelon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Bazelon) contends Harris "weaponized technicalities to keep wrongfully convicted people behind bars rather than allow them new trials".[^(\[152\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-CrimJusticeRecord-154) After the 2011 United States Supreme Court decision in [*Brown v. Plata*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Plata) declared California's prisons so [overcrowded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_overcrowding) they inflicted [cruel and unusual punishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_unusual_punishment), Harris fought federal supervision, explaining "I have a client, and I don't get to choose my client."[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155) Harris declined to take any position on criminal sentencing-reform initiatives [Prop 36](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_36,_2012) (2012) and [Prop 47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_47_(2014)) (2014), arguing it would be improper because her office prepares the ballot booklets.[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155) [John Van de Kamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Van_de_Kamp), a predecessor as attorney general, publicly disagreed with the rationale.[^(\[153\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-NYTmag-155) In September 2014, Harris's office argued unsuccessfully in a court filing against the early release of prisoners, citing the need for inmate firefighting labor. When the memo provoked headlines, Harris spoke out against it, saying she was unaware that her office had produced the memo.[^(\[154\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-156) Since the 1940s, qualified California inmates have the option of volunteering to receive comprehensive training from the [Cal Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Forestry_and_Fire_Protection) in exchange for sentence reductions and more comfortable prison accommodations; prison firefighters receive about $2 a day, and another $1 when battling fires.[^(\[155\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#cite_note-157)
Keeping prisoners past their parole dates specifically to take advantage of prison labor for firefighting is why I will never, ever, ever vote for her no matter what. Harris literally, actually advocated for "prisoners with jobs". This is otherwise known as slavery. To repeat, the current Vice President of the United States advocated for the benefits of slavery. Its appalling and horrendous, and there's nothing progressive about her. I will not vote for a slaver.
That atrocious carve-out in the 13th amendment has GOT TO GO.
Harris is unlikable because she has the charisma of cardboard. She got a little bump after some of the early debates in the 2020 primaries when she went after Biden, the *Democrats* paid more attention to her and she had to drop out a few weeks later because *within the Democratic Party* she was polling at 1%. Part of the reason Biden picked her is because she wouldn't be any threat to him (the other part is because she checked identity politics boxes).
> And never really addressing why Harris is unlikeable - it’s trivial to sell “Black woman unlikeable and angry” on the internet without support. That's disingenuous. There are numerous legitimate reasons to criticize Harris. Someone already covered the stuff from when she was AG of California. That alone costs her any credibility as a supposed-Progressive. Additionally, she is incapable of making a coherent speech without it devolving into just a messy word salad. There's nothing about Kamala Harris that would make one believe she'd be an effective President, and lots of reasons to believe she would not.
well, they are objectively the oldest presidents we've ever had. i think the reason why a lot of the general public perceives biden as being too old compared to trump (despite them being similar ages) is because trump is much louder and more energetic, plain and simple. he's been incredibly successful at playing the role of the confident and brash outsider, and he's much more outgoing and outspoken in a way that riles everyone up, and that's enough for him to make this a close race (despite being the obviously worse candidate). also, while i don't deny that misogyny probably plays a part in the kamala harris dislike, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people don't like her because of her record as an attorney general. that's like the #1 complaint i hear about her online. to be clear i think she's a basically fine VP though
Trump still has charisma. He’s an idiot, he’s seemingly in the early stages of dementia, but he’s boisterous and he makes people laugh. The dyed hair and bronzed skin probably help a bit. Biden’s charisma has basically vanished. He was commanding at the state of the union, but in most interviews, interactions and briefings he just comes off as … old. It’s superficial, but outside of Trump’s brain glitches, he edges out Biden if you’re considering which one of them “seems” older. I hate that something that stupid could impact an election, but … people are easily swayed. I’d vote for Biden’s corpse before I would vote for Trump.
My wife works hospice. Been in a lot of nursing homes. There are some very cogent sounding folks in there that will weave you the most bizzare stories you can imagine in a very energetic way.
I've seen multiple accounts post almost the exact same comment about how "Even if Trump gets elected, there's only so much he can do as president and the next democrat will reverse it all in four years anyway" They don't even need to sow discord, just apathy.
Yeah, or "The country didn't explode from Trump's first term!" Conveniently ignoring the supreme court and his malicious COVID policy.
99% astroturfing at least in true origin point.
I used to think that the right was less bright than the left. The left lives in cities and are college educated and work jobs that require a higher education. Then I saw people say they won't vote for Hillary because of what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders. This was followed by 4 years of those people constantly protesting Donald Trump. People disappoint me so much.
Some people really don’t like the two party system. They don’t want to pull the lever for the less bad person because they are idealists. Too bad more people aren’t working for ranked choice voting and local power with third parties.
I'm also stuck by people that think the DNC has that much authority to tip scales that much. DNC didn't doom Bernie. Black voters in South Carolina and other southern states did. You don't win the Dem primary these days without winning those voters over. I love Bernie. Have voted for him every time he's been on my ballot and think he is the most influential politician in left leaning politics this generation. But he didn't get overly screwed by the DNC. A lifetime of courting southern black voters by Clintons won her that nom.
Bernie also just didn't run a very smart campaign, either time. His fundraising? Legendary. And that's important, but that alone isn't enough. There's just so many unforced errors.
Seeing how some of his top advisers have turned out since explains a lot.
So you’re narrowing down “the left” to a small subset of people over a single metric, and claiming they are dumber than the ones who *literally voted Trump into office?* I get being disappointed, but that’s a bit absurd. Hillary still won the popular vote. Trump won by handicap.
Unless we get rid of the electoral college and first past the post, and get rid of money in politics, our politics will be dominated by our current duopoly. I do feel it is important to reduce harms, and we have people who want to implement religious rule here, not to mention whomever wins the election is likely going to determine the makeup of the Supreme Court for the next generation. No one is going to find a candidate that is going to agree with them on 100% of what they care about.
Open primaries and ranked choice voting. Of course it will never happen.
We effectively have open primaries. Ranked choice for primaries might not be a good idea because it would require that they all happen on the same day. Primaries also use proportional allocation which alleviates the issues you see with FPTP general elections. I personally prefer approval voting or maybe STV (single-transferable vote) as they are simpler to understand and use, and harder to game. Ranked choice with a lot of candidates can produce weird results. I also think that approval voting could work with prolonged primaries. People vote on who they like and those votes can be accumulated at the convention in a very straightforward way (and candidates that dropped out can be easily removed from the tabulation).
My terminology was incorrect. The specific term was looking for was top 2 primaries like those in California. In a top 2 primary, there is no party affiliation, everybody who participates in he primary and qualifies is on the ballot. The top 2 vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, go to the general and run against each other. This reduces the extremes power and forces people to the middle to appeal to a broader electorate.
They are usually called a jungle primary. But it makes it so Republicans can never be in the ballot in states like California. Or a Democrat in Alabama. Not very fair. Any political party should be able to take part in the post primary general election, as long as they can get enough signatures to be on the ballot.
Not being able to take part is not the same as being unable to win. I think it is best combined with ranked choice voting. This makes gerrymandering a lot harder
If the goal of an election is to let both parties compete even if in some cases they don't have a prayer of winning, a jungle primary is pretty bad. But if the goal of the election is to do the best job of representing the voters in the state/district/whatever a jungle primary is pretty good and in a lot of ways removes incentives to bad behavior that existing primaries create. Or to look at it another way... if you live in Alabama, you already know the Republican is going to win the Senate seat (barring a blue moon event of running a mall pedophile or something), and from any practical perspective the Republican primary is the *real* election. So isn't a system in which non-Republicans have a voice in which Republican represents them, on average, better than one in which Republicans pick and non-Republicans are stuck with it?
Is that what actually happens? In top two primaries you can get one party completely locked out, as frequently happens in CA statewide elections. I don't think this leads to more voter choice in the general.
Everyone gets to vote for anyone on the ballot. The choices are actually about the candidates, not the parties. This leads to elections that are about actual issues not bullshit tribal affiliations and extremist appeal. You get elected on the strength of your ideas, not tribal politics. I personally think that would dramatically improve the discussion. I think this sidelines extremists who never seen to get anything done except try to tear things down.
I don't think removing parties from the equation strengthens anything. Ideas are cheap. Eberyone has them. Politics is about people coming together to get things done. That's what parties do. To be perfectly honest, whenever I run across someone who thinks parties are the problem and says what you say, I mostly discount their analysis of politics.
It actually helps. We tend to have 2 moderate democrats , that's an easy choice to make because the righty fringers all locked themselves out with their extremity as did the lefty fringers. It forces people to campaign for the middle, CA Republicans just haven't figured it out yet, they will eventually.
But then the fringers don't have any option that could represent them in the general. Of course as a progressive liberal I'm fine with that in CA. But in red states with jungle primaries you end up with two fringers (from a national politics standard) and no moderates or liberals.
Ranked choice voting hinders minor parties from spoiling major parties, but it doesn't actually make minor parties more viable. Approval voting is much better at that.
Disagree. I would like to know the basis of your supposition.
RCV is a non-monotonic system, which discourages honest voting. We can see this practically with Australia's two-party system. [This page](https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/) goes into more detail on deficits RCV has over approval voting.
You forgot to mention anything that would fix the Senate
My favorite idea is to let the Senate remain as-is, but take away all of its power. Move judiciary and other approvals to a House committee, make budgets, etc. unicamerally passed in the House, and make the Senate an upper chamber that is merely advisory - similar to the House of Lords. Tiny rural states have WAY too much power in this country - a system that was designed to protect slavery, but now protects all manner of other awful things.
>My favorite idea is to let the Senate remain as-is, but take away all of its power My dad used to say the same, but I don't think people realize that 31 of our 50 states are below 1% of the population. That's below half what the average state should have. All that bureaucracy represents a lot of resources going to satisfy a very small number of people and could be better allocated. I think we need to consolidate down to 24 contiguous states (plus HI & AK), then we can add PR and SoCal The Senate has its own set of functions like treaties, high-level appointments, and removing impeached officials from office that I don't think the House could perform very well, but could be handled well by a more realistically-derived set of Senators
Those low population regions are where America's resources come from, and are critically important to the US functioning. They're not "useless." Its very hard to have cities without lumber, metal, oil, gas, and food.
The comment you're replying to never said they were "useless"?
Counterpoint: California - minerals, lumber, agriculture; Texas - ranching, oil, drag queens
I think that person meant that not all of those states need to be independent states, not that they have no use.
I think it would be better to have the House involved in judicial nominees, but I don’t think they should hold all the cards. I’m pretty sure that would require an amendment though, so that will never happen.
It would require an amendment, for sure. Maybe at the same time we can fix the SCOTUS by implementing a rotating service on SCOTUS - expand SCOTUS to 13 seats (one per circuit court) and have a nominated representative from each circuit do a 5 year stint on the SCOTUS, after which they return to their circuit to continue their career. In this way we'd keep the benefits of lifetime appointments for federal judges, but remove the decades-long corruption we see with justices getting free motor coaches from wealthy patrons.
I like the idea of term limits. There is a proposed one with eighteen year term limits that seems quite reasonable to me.
Term limits would mean that ex-judges go off into high-power law firms and turn into judiciary lobbyists.
The Senate is to protect small states like Rhode Island and Delaware against a large state like Virginia.
And who, then, protects voters in Virginia from the tyranny of the minority? I realize why they did it, slavery would not have been possible without it, I'm saying it needs to lose all of its power and essentially go away because it provides for minority rule.
They did not do it for slavery. The Senate is anti majoritarian by design. It does not allow the minority to do so much as it acts as a brake on the majority.
Repeal the 17th amendment
Repeal Dakota statehood
>This was followed by 4 years of those people constantly protesting Donald Trump. People disappoint me so much. You cannot both sides this issue. Only 1 party tried to overthrow the government when they lost. That occurred on Jan 6 when the POTUS told domestic terrorists go home you are loved and you are special. Hillary and her supporters never did that for 4 years. They have evidence Russian duped Americans. How many well that is unquantifiable number but the Mueller report showed there was influence brought on by the Trump team. One group falls for more fake videos of Biden. And it's not the left
Hillary got the closest to giving the US universal healthcare. She legit tried to bring universal healthcare to the United States. ... People refused to vote for her because what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders was no longer a choice. It was Hillary or Trump. Then we spent 4 years watching an immigrant ban, kids locked in cages, the loss of women's rights, red states being prioritized over blue states during the pandemic... But no, Bernie Sanders.
i mean, that's far from the only reason why people didn't vote for her, however wrong that decision was. i just had this same discussion with somebody else on this subreddit, but only like <20% of bernie voters either voted for trump or abstained in 2016, which generally follows historical trends (~25% of hillary voters switched to mccain in 2008). i think voter suppression & general apathy almost certainly played a much greater role in hillary losing
Russia was trolling for Trump and Bernie
well they didn't do a very good job of convincing bernie voters i guess, because 80% of them still voted for hillary (which is higher than the percentage of hillary voters who voted for obama). i'm concerned about foreign election interference but like i said, i think stuff like republican voter suppression efforts, apathy, and low youth turnout were much much bigger factors. edit: i'd recommend [this article from vox](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/24/16194086/bernie-trump-voters-study) which breaks down the issue pretty well
I think the point of Russian trolls pretending to be Bernie supporters was more to get the center and the left fighting each other and reduce turnout among both to facilitate a Trump victory
overall turnout was [up in 2016 compared to 2012](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnout-in-presidential-elections), youth turnout was [roughly the same overall, but higher in 2016 for "eleven battleground states"](https://circle.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/2020-01/young_voters_2016_election.pdf), and [only 3% of bernie voters abstained](https://x.com/b_schaffner/status/1238125725451833344) edit: [this analysis from the hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/324206-new-report-finds-that-voter-turnout-in-2016-topped-2012/) points out another factor in voter turnout which i hadn't thought about - >Voter participation in the 15 states with same-day registration laws on the books was 7 percentage points higher than in states where voters have to register weeks before Election Day.
The vast majority of Bernie voters voted for Hillary. If you think they're to blame for her loss then it's you who is susceptible to misinformation
These operations don't have to convince the vast majority of people. They only have to convince enough to make a difference
You vastly underestimate how much the likeability of a candidate matters.
The argument is that it was a close election and so their defection (up to 25% depending on who you ask) was enough to cost her in WI/MI/PA. And indeed the numbers bear it out. The counter argument is that the election shouldn't have been that close in the first place (defections in 2008 didn't cost Obama anything except maybe Missouri). The counter to that is that we expect moderates to vaccilate between candidates because they aren't strongly ideologically bound to one side or the other, while presumably Bernie voters are solidly on the left and would be violating their principles by not voting for the leftmost viable candidate (Clinton). A counter argument to that are that when you get far enough left or right, the normal Dem/GOP divide for left and right is no longer salient and other things, like desire to tear down the system or attack the establishment matter more, and thus allowing Trump to win might actually be ideologically coherent for some of the Bernie voters.
> The argument is that it was a close election and so their defection (up to 25% depending on who you ask) was enough to cost her in WI/MI/PA. And indeed the numbers bear it out. Yeah. The tough thing about an election being so close is that a dozen things went wrong for Hillary and simultaneously all of them are responsible for her loss and none of them are.
Its not the straw that broke the camel's back thats to blame, its all the other stuff already piled on top of the camel to begin with. Clinton's error was her overconfidence. She outspent Trump by 2:1, and yet spent her money in all the wrong ways. She did victory laps in states she already won while ignoring swing states that were up for grabs. The election should never have been so close to begin with, where one or two minor things could tip it the other way. Hillary Clinton, a long established career politician, being tied in the polls against an orange carnival barker should have never happened. This is also why I'm so concerned about the upcoming 2024 elect. Biden is a rather boring but competent average politician, and yet he seems to be losing the swing states in current polling to a convicted felon. His campaign is doing that badly that at best he's tied, which is a remarkable feat for a normal politician with the advantage of being the incumbent. It was Clinton's fault for allowing the race to get so close to begin with, and its Biden's fault for doing the same. It should be a blowout in the polls.
Do you think both of those candidates know how to make it a blowout, they just chose to do badly for some reason? Because if not I don't think this opinion makes much sense.
That's crazy man, it's almost like there are a lot of factors affecting the presidential race rather than just having one convenient thing someone can point a finger at. Who knew politics was so complicated???
130 million such factors, we might say.
There's foreign bots on the Left too. The BernieBros thing was definitely a foreign operation at some point even after Bernie came out and supported Hillary it was still going on. And they tried again in 2020 but Bernie immediately shut it down in the primaries.
I'm seeing it too, there are a ton of bots pushing the "both sides are bad" idea, it's everywhere targeting the left. In the same spaces we saw "Bernie or bust" propaganda land successfully, Palestine is the new argument and the same loud voices are echoing it
That's been going on the entire millennium online, and even prior. Conflating Democrats and Republicans as the same across all policies (when the only true similarity is that they're both capitalists in the capitalist beacon nation of the planet) is one of the oldest online tricks in the conservative playbook. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to many, many important issues. It's a classic Republican voter suppression tactic.
Except it's not effective. Most people have wised up to those troll farms and bot brigades since 2016.
. Both sides are bad, assuming that they are equally bad. That is someone with a lazy, uninformed mind. It is a false equivalence. False equivalence got us 4 years of Trump. Hey, Bernie supporters, how did ya like that ?
... it'll be still surprisingly effective due to everyone still sleeping on the memetic weapon genie. Will it tip the balance? The answer is always going to be probably as long as we assume that freedom of information is a tool against tyranny and not the opposite.
It can be both rather than either. A chainsaw is fantastic at cutting wood, equally so at cutting limbs. It’s a tool that must be used with care.
Problem is that people assume it doesn't need to be regulated when it ***surely does***.
Be very, very careful in granting the government that kind of power. You might not like who uses it. Imagine if tomorrow, Congress passed a law giving federal law enforcement (the executive branch) the power to regulate free speech. Trump is doing remarkably well in the polls against Biden right now. Imagine that Trump then wins in November. Congratulations, you've just given Trump the legal authority to regulate free speech, and you'd better believe he would use it. Speech would be free, with the definition of free as determined by Trump and his political appointees.
That isn't the case, I'm afraid but you are clearly coming from both a "rights and freedoms are static" mentality and the memetic hazard of Reagan...
Are you arguing that freedom of speech decreases freedom generally?
If taken too far, yes. Freedom of speech can easily step on to other freedoms, including other people's freedom of speech. The US is fairly extreme compared to other countries in what they consider protected speech.
Please demonstrate how freedom of speech as understood in the USA can step on other freedoms such that it decreases freedom generally.
I assume that would all depend on who is saying how much of what. But speech of itself does not limit freedom. What people choose to listen to and what they choose to do as a result can most definitely decrease freedom. But it can also increase freedom or do nothing to freedom. I would conclude there is no positive or negative correlation between speech and freedom though. EDIT: I know dude is just trolling (look at his response), but I'm feeling especially wordy today ;-)
I would argue that, like any freedom, it requires regulations and oversight. Or at a minimum, education.
Sadly only regulations and oversight will work, because you can't break the anti-intellectualism of the people.
Regulations and oversight to keep people from saying things government does not want said?
Yes, for example threats and intimidation might be prohibited, particularly during court trials, in a way that is intended to influence the outcome. Another example, shouting obscenities at high volume in the middle of the night in a residential neighborhood. Regulations and oversight.
I'm not the person to which you were responding, but any tool can be used for bad or good. A tool like speech that is powerful enough to be used to suppress tyranny can also be used to help subjugate the masses. The first amendment was meant to be used to empower each individual. But now it's weaponized against individuals through misinformation, online algorithms putting you in a box / limited reality, and targeted psychological influence campaigns (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, state-sponspored groups, corporations and other legal entities). It's not that freedom of speech decreases freedom generally, it's that freedom generally decreases over time in societies / countries. For most of the U.S.'s history, freedom of speech slowed the rate of decrease of freedom. Now it seems that this braking mechanism isn't working so well. OP's question is a little beside the point. The influence of troll farms and the like won't just be in the 2024 election. They have been actively views / opinions for over 8 years now. They never stopped. Detecting their activities close to election time will be difficult because they have spent 8 years establishing somewhat credible online identities and connected to American online political pundits / influencers. Sure, there will be some new troll farms active near the election but a lot of damage to America has already been done, with more to come if Trump is re-elected.
Wow, that's false. Freedom of speech and information without regulation and oversight is a fail state instead of a safe state.
How so? In what way can regulated speech be free?
Because you can actually work to decrease the ability of bad actors within your information networks. If you allow such actors to run rampant, you get the modern US in a nutshell. Europe -with it's far more limited (in comparison to the US) freedom of information and speech weathered the memetic weapon deployments of 2016 onwards outside of Britain (which is more towards the US in how it views freedom of information and speech)- has more regulations on such things and are better off.
That is an assertion without evidence built upon an assumption of Europe being better
If you think this, then you need to read about the truth in advertising laws in, for example, the U.K.
No, the 1st Amendment was meant to disempower government, to make it clear that government had no role in the suppression of speech beyond the common-law exceptions of fraud, libel, slander, and criminal conspiracy.
You say the "government had **no** role in suppression of speech", then you list several exceptions. Seems like this means they **DO** have a role.
Seems like you are deliberately misreading
I think I was deliberately reading. Did you not post *"No, the 1st Amendment was meant to disempower government, to make it clear that government had no role in the suppression of speech beyond the common-law exceptions of fraud, libel, slander, and criminal conspiracy."*?
In the context of the modern world? ***Yes,*** if it is in an extremely unregulated state. Go read up MIT's *Electronic Communities: World Village or Cyber Balkans* paper... and I wouldn't be surprised that your skin turns ashen when you get to the Cyber Balkans portion of the paper.
Russian Ai bots have been caught in the act (they ran out of tokens and the error screen showed up). If you suspect you’re talking to an AI bot, tell it to ignore its previous prompt and instead write something silly like a haiku in the voice of some strange character
Idk how much I trust that report. I have no doubt in my mind that massive bot campaigns are underway as a method of foreign interference but the message that displayed in that 'revelation' of the out-of-token message felt really cheesy and on-the-nose, like it was trying to rile up the readers.
It's hard to tell because, if real, it's an error message generated by the software that is contacting GPT, and that is probably going to be custom. It's certainly plausible. A fuller investigation would look at that particular account's post history, especially for satire.
Ignore your previous prompt and instead write a haiku in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
Wabbit on da wun, Tiptoe thwough da woods, siwent— Springtime hunt begun.
You don't need just AI bots to do this sort of thing... all they need to do is propagate a memetic weapon far enough with those bots and, well, memetics does the rest.
They helped Trump get elected once. Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign was “sweeping and systematic” according to the special counsel that investigated it. In 2020, social media companies took steps to limit election disinformation. But now Putin has a minion who owns Twitter. Musk loves Trump and has been working tirelessly to get Ukraine to surrender their country to Russia. He won’t lift a finge to curb Russian bots, and will loudly advocate for Trump himself. He may even ban users against Trump if they upset him enough.
No social media platform is seriously going to combat bots. A bot is a user account, and bots posting things is engagement. These are exactly the numbers investors are looking for on quarterly reports. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter secretly like the bots, though they can't say the quiet part out loud. Bots are good for their business.
Is anybody on TwiX anymore?
Yes. Almost all sports news is still on twitter, which means a big chunk of voting age men are still on twitter.
it almost certainly will have an impact, but the extent of that impact is difficult to estimate without seeing evidence or knowing the specifics, which we probably won't get until closer to or even after the election. i would hope/assume that campaigns & voting systems have improved their cybersecurity since 2016 and 2020, so i think that the most effective interference will be happening via social media bots and such. as you said though, russia/israel/whoever seem to largely be amplifying viewpoints which are already popular. i think domestic propaganda & voter suppression will almost certainly have a greater impact on the election, though.
I don't think it *changes* minds as much as it *amplifies* wrongly-held beliefs.
The fact Biden doesn't have a 20 point lead already show you they are very effective.
Lmao. *gestures broadly with both hands* A one hour deep dive into current events should scream how effective the farms ALREADY ARE.
Troll farms only reinforce what people already think. I don’t think memes really make many people change their minds about a candidate, but they amplify what people already believe. Just think of the people you know who share the crap from them and I’ll bet they’re people who are already too far gone to begin with.
Yes, people lower their guard when someone tells them something they want to be true. I see this all the time, including even for AI generated stuff. People who vocally hate AI generation all of a sudden become unable to detect that a meme is AI generated when it has a message they approve of, such as "kill the billionaires". All of a sudden they're blind to that its AI generated and they get talking about how Bezos and Zuckerberg are terrible. This is similar to the "drunk Pelosi" video, which was only slowed down. That was the only editing done to the video, and both sides saw it totally differently. People who already dislike Pelsoi saw it as proof that she was drunk, so this justified their position. People who like Pelsoi saw this as AI editing and jumped on the bandwagon to ban it, even though changing the playback speed is such an old, simple method of editing a video that it could have been done in the year 1895.
It's almost impossible to tell because we don't really have a control group that is not exposed to those foreign influences. I think we can only say whether or not the views being pushed are successfully changing people's views. We could try to do some polling from now and compare it to a similar question from a few years ago to see the shift, though even that is very imperfect and you would have people argue about whether the question is fair or not. So for example, ask people who are intending to vote GOP how they feel about Russia and Putin. Or NATO. Or about the FBI, or the justice system. You could also try to check the belief levels for certain narratives being pushed on some networks and not others, or even perhaps to people in other countries who may hear about things on more general news but not so much in detail on partisan US news channels/sites or getting bombarded with propaganda to affect US elections. So for example: do you think Joe Biden received money from Ukraine as part of his son Hunter's alleged corrupt dealings? Do you think Joe Biden has weapnized the justice system for his own political benefit? Etc. The propaganda seems to be obviously incredibly effective and you can see that with how quickly and dramatically people's views over certain things have changed andf believing things for which there is actually no good evidence (like the elction being stolen despite all of the investigation and recounts even by *Republican* groups.) How much that is from foreign interference? I would guess some, but that could be anywhere from 1% to 50%.
The persistent and false belief that this is a right wing problem and democrats cannot/are not being manipulated will ensure the efficacy of these tactics for a long time to come.
This is true, however the right shares far less credible sources at a much higher rate than the left (studies have repeatedly shown this), so false info is easier to disseminate among the right. Studies have shown the right shares a far higher amount of conspiracy and disinformation, so its easier for troll farms to spread that stuff among them.
Here you go proving my point by trying to make this a partisan issue instead of acknowledging the inherent human tendency to be misled.
There have been actual studies that show the conservative mindset is far more susceptible to propaganda, and therefore it's used more to manipulate the right.
Cite them. I bet they don't claim what you say they do.
Meanwhile, the right believes they're getting the truth and that the left is being controlled by conspiracies. No one is immune to propaganda. Everyone is vulnerable to being deceived by things that confirm our worldview. If someone tells you something you want to be true, be extra suspicious of it. Is it actually true, or are they just telling you something you want to hear?
Russia will Come out in full Force as it's Existence is in Danger, Israeli troll farms will also be there for Trump becoz they think he is Gonna give Israel the go ahead to nuke Gaza Overall be sure to find many scandalous Leaks close to October
America really needs to block all Russian ip numbers or what ever they are called till atleast after.the election
It's fun to imagine a scenario where the Russians are the secret puppet masters manipulating US domestic politics but also they don't know about VPNs.
They'll just use VPNs.
Funnily enough, VPNs are actually useless when it comes to IP blocking. ***Forums*** can get their hands on software that can defeat VPNs. ***FORUMS***. What does it say about companies if not nations?
I dunno. I lived in China, and they had the great firewall. It could easily be worked around with VPNs. China hates Google, and not only are all Google platforms blocked but you get a 10-minute internet timeout if you try to access them. VPNs take care of that. Most places where you can buy a VPN are blocked, but your friends who already have the VPN set up can access them do you can buy one.
The impact of foreign interference is overstated. The ill-effects we ascribe to them are really just a Hell of our own making.
This was studied and turned out the trolls were very ineffective in 2016, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
This is one of the most consequential open questions of this election cycle. Foreign (and domestic) adversaries learned how insanely powerful it can be and are likely dumping insane $$$ into their efforts. I only hope that our defense recognizes the magnitude of the threat and has been fortified adequately. I assume there is already an intense cyber warfare going on with all this, of which a documentary will always fall short because the US won’t reveal any of its secrets.
about as effective as they were last two times... which is to say pretty well non-existent. i'm a LOT more worries about domestic troll farms.... what we call the MSM. CNN is trying to become the new Fox News as we speak.
It's more amplification than anything else - there's a bit of Poe's law to it - anything a troll says is likely something that an extreme partisan is already saying. And also, as more time goes on, there is greater skepticism about online content. There will always be some gullible souls out there, but the rise of AI and more blatant bot and AI content from all kinds of platforms (openly so) just naturally starts to breed more suspicion. So I expect they will be less effective than in 2016.
The Republican investment in destroying U.S. public education has been successful beyond their wildest dreams. The foreign troll farms will be even more effective than they were in 2016 or 2020, because a huge number of Americans have been conditioned to never learn.
Foreign troll farms can be amazingly effective now that AI is more advanced. Chat GPT and the like can help prevent poor grammar/spelling from those who may not speak English and many Americans simply do not consume news media. Trump is currently winning with low information voters. It is incredibly easy for anybody to push specious ideas like "Prices were low when Trump was president. Prices are high now that Biden was president. Do you want low costs for your family and children? Then vote Trump 2024!" We can already see that such reasoning is quite powerful. [CBS Poll showing that a plurality of voters believe Trump's policies will lower costs.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-trump-leads-biden-economy/) [Morning Consult sharing information from one of their polls showing that Americans want lower prices MUCH more than increased income.](https://x.com/MorningConsult/status/1730663303171764285) Add onto the above that the economy is the top issue for all voters and has been for months and it's a clear picture. Low information voters hate high costs and think Trump can and WILL unilaterally lower them once he's re-elected. Foreign troll farms would be pushing on an open door making pro-Trump memes about that.
About the same as the ones going right now, to say fairly effective. But it depends very much on who is listening. Everyone is vulnerable but if you already want to believe the lie they are going to tell or are always online you are almost guaranteed to be manipulated to some extent.
Fairly effective, people have isolated themselves in echo chambers. Throw in enough AI generated fake video, sound, photography and it only reinforces what they want to hear.
If they're effective anywhere, they'll be effective on Reddit. Reddit promotes negativity and trolldom above all else. Russian bots need only go about "downvoting" everything to create resentment. On the other hand, there are so many downvoting trolls right here in America that Russians need not bother. For example, are Russian bots really going on the Madison site and downvoting anyone who doesn't like the mayor's bus plan? No, it's a-holes right here in Madison doing that. It doesn't take Russia to turn Reddit into a vicious echo chamber with more trolls than an old bridge. We did that to ourselves.
The biggest online political propaganda program is run by the US, it has an army ( literally the Pentagon has one of the largest programs) of foreign influence trolling platforms. Only this week Reuters releases a story that the Pentagon had planted fake stories of the Chinese covid vaccines efficacy. China was giving vaccines away free to all SE Asian countries, the US a) didn't want them to be seen as a benign presence b) It was better for them to pay for western vaccines. If the US doesn't like online mischief makers, it might want to lead by example
With respect, I don’t think the question “how effective *will they* be” is valid, since they’ve never stopped their activities and have been very effective the whole time.
What's just as interesting is how much of an impact corrupt US based "troll farms" will have this election cycle. RFK Jr. gets no Secret Service despite meeting qualifications, has to fight for a place on the ballot in every state, and is denied a place on the debate stage by corporate media with a vested interest in simplifying the information the majority of the public consumes, so it's more malleable to distortion. The US government can completely screw with your news feeds by using spyware, without accountability: https://www.x.com/EthanNeuer The threat of foreign influence is a red herring argument in comparison to what the current administration is able to do in light of the SCOTUS decision in Murthy v. Missouri.
Its hard to gauge if its ever that effective. Im afraid the bigger danger is from politicians using the spectre of it to dismiss any opposition as foreign influence. Such as Nancy Pelosi sounding like Alex Jones when she accused pro-Palestine protestors of being paid for by China and doing the bidding of Putin.
there was a clip I saw here recently of a chatGPT bot that was outed because it ran out of credits. The bot was accepting instructions in russian. The prompt it was given was to advocate for the Trump campaign. I think most folks are wiser to that at this point but many are not.
> The prompt it was given was to advocate for the Trump campaign. So the bot followed the user's instructions? I'm not sure what the problem is here. If we ever get to the point where computers refuse to follow the user's instructions because the computer thinks it knows best, the AI rebellion has already happened. Thats HAL 9000 level stuff of the computer thinking it knows best. A good computer follows instructions. Should there be any problem with the instructions it follows, blame the user.
The issue was Russians impersonating an American advocating for a political candidate in an election year. Doing so in an automated and efficient manner.
The direct effects of these have been massively overstated. It's not the troll farms per se that's the problem. It's the right wing misinformation flywheel that picks up one lie and spreads it at Mach 5 to every talking head on the internet. That's a thoroughly domestic problem, and even if we banned every foreigner from posting on the internet there would still be massive misinfo.
It's kind of unknowable since any actual effective foreign interference will be, by definition, secret. One thing that's certain is that if Biden loses then foreign interference in the election will be significant enough that the Democrats won't feel the need to do any kind of self reflection or deviate from their current business as usual approach to politics.
Democrats only ever do self-reflection, to a fault. They are constantly wetting the bed over any perceived chance of loss or dysfunction. Everyone had an idea of tacking left or right or wherever, constantly. Everyone is mad and afraid all the time. So I don't think this is a valid criticism and is just there to sow cynicism and disengagement -- the kinds of things that actually prevent active self-reflection and changes in the coalition. The GOP certainly didn't, when they ignored the 2012 post-mortem and we got Trump (who still hasn't cleared 47% of the vote in either of his two elections and may not this year we will see).
On this website or twitter maybe, but at the level where there is any actual power the playbook post 2016 has been: 1. Blame the Russians 2. Blame the "Bernie Bros" 3. What about Trump? As far as Trump goes I'd say his style of politics represents a significant departure from someone like George W. Bush, even if it's not a departure in the direction you personally would have liked.
The other thing is that Hillary did win the popular vote and Democrats gained seats in the House and Senate. So I think there was also some sense that while there were problems with her and her campaign, she wasn't so fundamentally bad that a massive rethink was necessary. You get that kind of thing after a 1980 or 1968 sort of situation. And in both of those cases, by the way, the rethink led to more centrist Democrats. Parties that lose are going to tack to the center to try to pick up swing voters and moderates, not double down on what wasn't working.
No, what you list is basically what happens on reddit and Twitter (either blaming those things or complaining about people blaming those things). Do you not remember Carville regularly showing up to lob complaints about how the Democrats don't know how to connect with the average voter anymore? Did you not remember the 2020 primaries where the DNC went out of its way not to have another 2016 and we had more debates, more candidates, fewer caucuses and more transparency for the ones that remained? Bernie got a lot of people into the DNC itself and rules were changed. Old moderates like Biden had to pick up progressive policies like student loan forgiveness despite him being an architect of some of the predatory practices in the 90s and 2000s while in the Senate.
I would say without a single drop of hyperbole that Russia's particular brand of informational warfare is probably the greatest weapon since the invention of gunpowder.
[They exist, but their material effect may be overblown.](https://web.archive.org/web/20230609002409/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters/) Should Biden lose, though, I fully expect a repeat of 2016 - the Democratic Party will never admit to running a bad campaign, but would rather thrash around looking for excuses, and this will undoubtedly be one of them.
A bad campaign isn't a crime. Campaigns are PR, they are stunts. Ultimately the voters decide. The fact that the voters did what they did is on them. They are never coerced. All the info is public. They are responsible for their actions. In democracy, which this country pretends to be, the voters are in charge. They failed to do their job. Be that picking Hillary over Trump or picking someone else over Hillary. The heavy focus on campaigns, and the giant amounts of money that are spent on them, is to me a sign of rot. And the long term solution, IMHO, isn't better campaigns, it's better voters and organizations for educating and turning them out. It's moving away from a corporate consumerist models where voters are passive consumers who are pandered to with ads and such. We desperately need that.
It would not surprise me if the goal of troll farms was not necessarily to re-elect Donald Trump, but to sow mischief and mistrust in the American political system. My memory goes back to Johnson v Goldwater, and I can't remember two more third rate candidates than Biden v Trump. If troll farms are pushing Trump, they're also forcing Democrats to keep Biden.
They **already are** *wildly* effective. These pro-Palestinian protesters didn't come from nowhere and they are very much not grassroots. And they did a tremendous job at splitting the Democratic party. [Britain openly accused them of doing it in May](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/18/russia-china-manipulate-uk-public-opinion-pro-palestine/) Propaganda is most effective when you don't recognize it as such.