After getting walloped by the Parkland students Laura Ingraham decides to take a vacation. Might as well, it's not like she has any advertisers left.

David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018

 Courtesy of Variety:  

Laura Ingraham is taking avacation next week. Now the question is whether a controversy swirling around the host will go on hiatus as well. 

The popular Fox News Channel host – her “Ingraham Angle” was the fourth most-watched cable-news program in February – told viewers Friday night she would not appear on air next week as she took what she described as a pre-planned break around the Easter holiday with her children. Substitute hosts are expected to fill in for her on the program. 

She leaves in the midst of heightened scrutiny. Ingraham set off an imbroglio Wednesday with a Twitter post mocking Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, one of the students who has spoken out about gun control prominently since a February 14th shooting incident at the Parkland, Florida school left 17 people dead. Her tweet linked to a report noting Hogg had been rejected from four California colleges. Her tweet also said Hogg “whines about” the rejections. 

That extremely immature attack resulted in a call for a boycott of Ingraham's advertisers and as of right now these are the businesses that have turned their backs on her:

Atlantis Bahamas 

Expedia 

Hulu 

Jenny Craig 

Johnson & Johnson

Liberty Mutual 

Nestle 

Nutrish 

Stitch Fix 

TripAdvisor 

and Wayfair. 

Okay THAT'S a hell of a list.  And there will likely be even more by the end of the day.

Keep in mind that Ingraham is not the ONLY conservative who has been brought to their knees after attacking these Parkland students, and if I were a Right Wing asshole I would be thinking twice about getting on the wrong side of these kids.

They are moving us to the future, and woe be to those that try to stand in their way.

New MIT study suggests that people simply prefer fake news to real news.

Courtesy of The Atlantic:  

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. 

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

.........

Though Vosoughi and his colleagues only focus on Twitter—the study was conducted using exclusive data that the company made available to MIT—their work has implications for Facebook, YouTube, and every major social network. Any platform that regularly amplifies engaging or provocative content runs the risk of amplifying fake news along with it. 

Though the study is written in the clinical language of statistics, it offers a methodical indictment of the accuracy of information that spreads on these platforms. A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best. 

Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news. 

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”

Well, that's disheartening. 

How do we actually reach and educate people who are conditioned to only respond to explosive headlines and hyperbolic content?

No seriously, I'm asking.

The Russians also infiltrated Reddit, one of the most popular websites on the internet.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Reddit admitted it has “found and removed a few hundred accounts” associated with Russian propaganda, one week after The Daily Beast confirmed the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, or Troll Farm, used the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman, writing under the username Spez, outlined both direct propaganda, such as troll accounts using the platform, and indirect propaganda, like subreddits such as r/The_Donald repeatedly linking to Russian Twitter troll account @TEN_GOP. “Given the recent news, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned,” he wrote. 

If you are a frequent visitor to Reddit this is not really news, since this was being called out during the election, but nothing was ever really done about it.

Like Facebook the moderators of Reddit seemed to ignore the problem altogether.

And that has really pissed off a number of Reddit users: 

Reddit users rebelled en masse against the site’s CEO for concealing Russian troll activity the site now admits it knew about, and for not working fast enough to ban dangerous and extremist communities. 

Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman admitted the site has been targeted by at least “a few hundred” troll accounts in an announcement to Reddit users on Monday, four days after a Daily Beast investigation confirmed for the first time that Russia’s troll farm used the platform. 

Reddit has not responded to repeated requests by The Daily Beast for comment about The Daily Beast’s investigation, which showed Russia’s Internet Research Agency used American proxies to access the site. 

Based on that reporting, Senate investigators are looking into opening up probes on the troll farm’s use of Reddit and Tumblr, according to The Washington Post.

I only visited that r/The Donald subreddit a few times, but the stuff that was posted on there was outrageous, misleading, and consistently pro-Donald Trump.

Many of the talking points that you may have seen defending Trump during the election, or minimizing news stories about him, originated on these subreddits and then spread far and wide on Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media outlets.

By the way as of this post r/The Donald is still up and has over half a million subscribers.

So did the Russian hackers get hacked? Maybe.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

The Kremlin-backed troll farm at the center of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has quietly suffered a catastrophic security breach, The Daily Beast has confirmed, in a leak that spilled new details of its operations onto obscure corners of the internet. 

The Russian “information exchange” Joker.Buzz, which auctions off often stolen or confidential information, advertised a leak for a large cache of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) internal documents. It includes names of Americans, activists in particular, whom the organization specifically targeted; American-based proxies used to access Reddit and the viral meme site 9Gag; and login information for troll farm accounts. 

Even the advertisement for the document dump provides a trove of previously unknown information about the breadth of Russia’s disinformation effort in the United States, including rallies pushed by IRA social media accounts that turned violent.

What the Daily Beast was able to confirm:  

While the date of the auction could not be independently confirmed, the authenticity of the leak can. The leaked documents list screen names connected to a number of American citizens who were used as unwitting proxies by the Russians. The Daily Beast was able to track down four of those citizens, whose names have not been previously revealed. The leak contains precise dates in 2016 in which the IRA-created account Blacktivist reached out to those U.S. citizens, plus a short description of the conversations. The Daily Beast spoke to those citizens, and confirmed they interacted with the Blacktivist account in the ways described by the IRA in the document. In one case, the American even provided screenshots of his interactions with the Russian troll trying to dupe him. 

In short, the leaked document contains details of the Russian disinformation campaign that have not been previously made public—details which The Daily Beast was able to confirm. 

The leak shows that even as the Russian trolls were able to influence and manipulate American political discourse online, they were less equipped to keep their own secrets. While The Daily Beast does not possess anything close to a comprehensive trove of the IRA’s internal operations, it is now likely that substantial amounts of the troll farm’s files are waiting to be discovered online.

This data treasure trove also reveals how the troll farm utilized social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and even Tumblr to spread their divisive propaganda and promote the Donald Trump campaign. 

It is also more proof that the investigations in Russian interference is not a "witch hunt" but rather a very important, and necessary step in protecting ourselves from future manipulation and interference.

Melania Trump voices support for the Parkland student's gun control crusade.

Now Melania Trump is addressing governors' spouses. She offers thoughts and payers to the victims and praises the students speaking out https://t.co/szBUkFmMdD

— Meg Wagner (@megwagner) February 26, 2018

Courtesy of The Hill: 

First lady Melania Trump on Monday said she was "heartened" to see students across the country speaking out following a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., earlier this month. 

"I have been heartened to see children across this country using their voices to speak out and try to create change. They're our future, and they deserve a voice," the first lady said, addressing governors' spouses at a luncheon at the White House. 

"Our continued thoughts and prayers go out to all who were affected by such a senseless act. As a parent, I cannot imagine the kind of grief a tragedy like that brings," she added. 

Monday's appearance marked the first time she has addressed the shooting publicly. She offered her condolences on Twitter immediately after the shooting took place.

When I first heard this I thought that Melania was publicly disagreeing with her husband, but then the other day Trump suggested that he wanted stronger background checks and to do away with the "bump stocks" that were used in the Las Vegas massacre.

I don't believe him of course, because he pulled this same shit by promising to work on DACA and protect people's access to health care.

What I do know is that Melania is on a completely different side of this issue than Junior, who retweeted conspiracy theories about these kids.

Don Jr. has liked at least two tweets pushing content that attempts to discredit one of the most vocal student survivors of the Parkland school shooting. pic.twitter.com/YI9ANh5dlL

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 20, 2018

That led to one of the Parkland kids reaching out to Melania on social media.

Hey @FLOTUS you say that your mission as First Lady is to stop cyber bullying, well then, don’t you think it would have been smart to have a convo with your step-son @DonaldJTrumpJr before he liked a post about a false conspiracy theory which in turn put a target on my back

— Lauren Hogg (@lauren_hoggs) February 23, 2018

So maybe that got Melania's attention and that is why she is voicing support for these kids.

Or this could simply be some Trump family double speak and she really could not care less.

Hard to tell really. 

While Donald Trump pretends there is nothing to see here, Russia expands its troll factory.

Courtesy of Unian:  

As the city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reports in an investigative article published just before New Year, the 4,000 square meters of their previous address on 55, Savushkina Street have been replaced by 12,000 square meters in St Petersburg’s Lakhta business district, according to the Euromaidan Press. 

The impressive threefold increase of workspace is a testimony to the success of the “factory”. As Russian RBC Daily’s investigation in April 2017 showed, the trolling activities have now branched out into a conglomerate of at least 16 different online outlets, all of which voice strong support for Kremlin’s policies, while systematically linking to each other’s products. At the same time, they carry little or no advertisement. 

The owner of the “troll factory”, businessman and billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, has also become known as “Putin’s chef” because of his success in providing catering services for, among other clients, the Kremlin and other branches of the Russian government. Mr Prigozhin has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for providing financial support for Russia’s military occupation of Ukraine. Delovoy Peterburg’s investigation also reveals that the owners of the new premises are contributors to President Putin’s election campaign. 

The infamous Russian troll factory also known as Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been reportedly run by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin in the Russian city of Saint-Petersburg. For years, the agency has been pushing pro-Russian narratives to promote the Kremlin’s interests in the world attempting to influence domestic policy and public opinion in the EU, U.S., Ukraine, and other countries, or just supporting opposite extreme opinions to sow chaos in target countries. 

And while this is happening the Trump Administration has not really lifted a finger to keep us safe.

At least the FBI is doing something.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

The FBI plans to alert U.S. companies and the public about efforts by Russia or other nations to use disinformation and social media manipulation to interfere in upcoming elections, while being careful not to upset free speech and constitutional rights, a top law enforcement official said. 

The direction that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “foreign influence" task force is heading could dramatically reshape the relationship between government and social media companies in order to address vulnerabilities that enabled Russia to meddle in the 2016 election. 

“We’ve been reluctant in some instances to share the amount of information of what we know about what’s happening," said Jeffrey Tricoli, a top FBI official heading the task force. “You can’t stay with the same strategy if you think there needs to be changes. So going forward there’s going to be opportunities for us to share information in better ways.” 

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced late last year that the task force had been created. But almost everything about it has been secretive to date. Tricoli provided the first extensive public comments about it during an FBI conference in New York Wednesday co-sponsored by Fordham University.

Does that seem a little too tentative to anybody else? 

You know if this were a conventional war I do not think the FBI would simply be telling people not to stand right there because there might be a bomb coming. They would be fighting back.

I think we all know that if Hillary Clinton had won that 2018 election that there would be a far more aggressive campaign to deal with Russian interference.

Apparently her engagement did not prove a big enough of a distraction so Willow Palin takes to social media to defend her out of control brother.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail: 

The 23-year-old hairdresser took to social media and blasted her brother's critics on Friday, saying: ' I swear the second people decide to post a rude comment about someone else's family ... all of the sudden they come from a family full of frickin saints who have done no wrong.' 

She also took aim at one woman in particular who wrote: 'Well at least her brother didn't kick the s*** out of the fiance. By the way is Willow knocked up yet? You know, like following in her sister's footsteps.' 

Willow responded by mocking the woman,saying: 'Still wanting to be young and hip trying to keep up with her daughter. Twice divorced. Spends majority of her time trolling Instagram. Takes enjoyment out of her sad life to make unnecessary comments that doesn't get her anywhere.' 

She also commented: 'Bout to lose my shiete and call all these cowards out.' 

It appears that Willow is having some trouble spelling "shit."

Here let me help.

It's P-A-L-I-N.

Well, at least that's how Alaskans spell it now. 

First let me just say that I was perfectly willing to leave Willow out of all of this.

As I have said a number of times in the past, she is my favorite Palin.

However.....I guess she wants to be involved, so now she is involved.

For one thing the idea that she is calling somebody else out for trying to be young and hip, when her mother dresses like this...

...is laugh out loud funny.

Secondly Willow needs to remember that the only reason that anybody gives two shits about any of this is because he mother trotted the whole family out on that 2008 RNC stage and tried to pass them off as the All American, Norman Rockwell, Frontier Family.

If she had not attempted to thrust her dysfunctional, inbred family onto the American people like that then all of this would only concern the immediate family, and the people of Wasilla standing behind their doors with the rifle barrels placed against the peephole waiting for Track Palin to come for one of them.

Thirdly I understand that Willow might be a little upset that she was forced to prematurely announce her engagement to Jethro Bodine's dumber cousin, but she should not take it out on the folks making comments on social media.

She should take it out on her parents.

After all, aren't they really the source for all of these problems?

Journalist Sarah Kendzior explains that the end of net neutrality may also signal the end of the resistance against Donald Trump.

Courtesy of the the Globe and Mail: 

We Americans may be a captive audience to our reality-TV star who thinks he's an authoritarian, but we are a chatty audience, and our loquaciousness has been our salvation. For nearly a year, we have exercised First Amendment rights like we were working a defibrillator on democracy's damaged heart. We debunked lies, catalogued crimes, demanded justice and created a vast, informal movement dedicated to the pursuit of truth over alternative facts. 

But that may be about to end. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission announced it was planning a sweeping rollback of net neutrality, allowing corporations to decide what content is available online while pricing most citizens out of equal access to information. 

For nearly a year, America has stood at the crossroads of a damaged democracy and a burgeoning autocracy. If net neutrality is destroyed, we will cross firmly into the latter, and our return is unlikely. 

The threat to net neutrality highlights the reliance on social media and an independent press for political organizing in the digital age. Should net neutrality be eliminated, those avenues will likely become curtailed for much of the public or driven out of business due to loss of revenue. Without the means to freely communicate online, citizens will be far less able to challenge the administration. It doesn't matter what cause someone prioritizes: The elimination of net neutrality will impede the ability to understand the cause, discuss it and organize around it.

She's not wrong.

The best bulwark we have against fascism is our 1st Amendment which has now evolved to include our ability to communicate online in a variety of social media platforms.

Including this one.

This is one of those moments in history where a people are confronted with a choice which may determine the survival of their society as it exists in the present.

Just imagine for a moment what it would be like if Donald Trump and his cronies were able to use their connections to big telecom companies to put the squeeze on CNN, MSNBC, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Politico, etc., and quiet their voices to a low murmur in the background.

If you do not think that is ultimately the plan then you have not been paying attention.

P.S. For those of you who do not know who Sarah Kendzior is, here is video of her going off on a representative from Breitbart.

This video went viral again, so a little context. It's from a late Nov 2016 panel at the News XChange conference in Denmark. I was responding to Matthew Boyle of Breitbart, who is seated at the end of the row. https://t.co/OCMuaglwvD

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) November 26, 2017

We are dealing with a lot of important issues right now, but arguably net neutrality is one of the MOST important.

Facebook is now going to let you find out if you were manipulated by Russian propaganda. Spoiler alert: You probably were.

Courtesy of Bloomberg:  

Facebook Inc. will show people which Russian propaganda pages or accounts they’ve followed and liked on the social network, responding to a request from Congress to address manipulation and meddling during the 2016 presidential election.

The tool will appear by the end of the year in Facebook’s online support center, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. It will answer the user question, “How can I see if I’ve liked or followed a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency?” That’s the Russian firm that created thousands of incendiary posts from fake accounts posing as U.S. citizens. People will see a list of the accounts they followed, if any, from January 2015 through August 2017.

It’s Facebook’s most direct effort to explain to users how they may have been affected by the IRA’s postings, which reached an estimated 150 million people and stirred up controversy over gun rights, immigration, race relations and religion in the U.S., sometimes prompting real-world protests on both sides of a debate. 

“It is important that people understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 US election,” the company said in the post.

I know my headline seems a little assholey, but even if you did not participate on Facebook, friends and family members who you spoke to very likely did.  

So while they were expressing their political point of view to you, it is quite likely, whether they were conservatives or liberals, that the Russians helped to influence it just a little.

I told you about that one friend at the gym who said that he saw a photo of Hillary Clinton standing among dead bodies that convinced him she was a war monger.

I never saw such a picture, and believe me I looked for it, but it still bothered me. It manipulated my emotions to some degree.

In the end if you did not vote for Hillary Clinton, which seems to have been the absolute focus of this propaganda, then it is more than likely that you were at least subliminally influenced by something the Russians sent out on social media.

Instagram joins the growing list of social media platforms that the Russians used to manipulate the American people.

Courtesy of Business Insider:

It's been a couple months since Facebook confirmed that fake accounts likely originating in Russia bought ads on the platform to sow discord during the 2016 presidential campaign. 

On Friday, the company revealed that its subsidiary Instagram was also used in an attempt to influence the election. And on Wednesday, as officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before Congress, House Democrats released examples of the Instagram posts in question.

The ads are similar in many ways to those posted on Facebook and Twitter, which also targeted things like Sharia law, Black Lives Matter, and gay rights.

They're similar in another fundamental way: They succeeded in reaching millions of Americans. Colin Stretch, general counsel for Facebook, said Tuesday before Congress that malicious Russian actors managed to produce 120,000 relevant Instagram posts, which reached 16 million people from October through the election. 

The data before October is murkier, according to Stretch, though the company estimates that another 4 million people likely saw content from Russian accounts.

At this point I think we can safely assume that every social media platform was infected with Russian propaganda designed to alter our political points of view and make us hate each other even more. 

And no, staying completely off of social media yourself does nothing to solve this problem.

Twitter announces that it will now clearly identify tweets supporting candidates and utilize stronger penalties for those who misuse the social media platform.

Courtesy of CNBC: 

As political pressure mounts on social media companies to say where ads are coming from, Twitter will reveal more information about political advertising on its platform. 

Twitter said in a blog post on Tuesday it would clearly label political electioneering ads, which the Federal Election Commission (FEC) defines as an ad used to promote a specific candidate for elected office or affiliated party posted within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. Electioneering ads can also include any ad clearly promoting a political candidate at any time. 

The ads will have some sort of visual marker, likely a purple dot next to the user handle, and a purple box with the text "Promoted by" and the name of the sponsor.

In addition, the company will limit which criteria can be used to target people and will introduce a "stronger" penalty on those who do not abide by the new rules. The company did not say what the tougher standards or penalties will be.

I am not really sure how much this will help, since what really needs to happen is that Twitter identify and purge fake accounts and bots that simply promote misinformation to mislead the public.

However I guess we can view this as a good first step, and at least they are willing to do something.

Still it really needs to be up to the individual user to be vigilant and to do the legwork to research things they see on Twitter and make sure it is accurate.

Facebook "corrects bug" which scrubs data from the internet that allowed investigators to learn ads bought by the Russians reached far more Americans than previously reported by the company.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well. 

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier.

“This is public interest data,” Albright said Wednesday, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared — or at least moved somewhere the public can’t see it. “This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.” 

Facebook does not dispute it removed the posts, but it offers a different explanation of what happened. The company says it has merely corrected a “bug” that allowed Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place. That bug, Facebook says, has now been squashed on a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year.

CrowdTangle had allowed advertisers to view the metrics concerning the reach of their ads.

Now that Facebook has "fixed" it viewing that information is no longer possible.

I think it is now time to stop viewing Facebook as a benign social media platform who were simply used to help an adversarial foreign government hijack an election. 

It appears now that they have revealed their true nature.

Google uncovers evidence that it was also used by the Russian to manipulate voters in the 2016 election.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company's investigation. 

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. 

The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

I have been waiting for Google to join the party.

After all if you are going to manipulate American voters it makes no sense to ignore perhaps the biggest player on the internet.

And of course utilizing Google's multiple social platforms also includes You Tube, which apparently allowed the Russians to recruit black vloggers who made videos to convince the black community that Hillary Clinton's campaign was funded by Muslims.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.” 

These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences. 

“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.”

Like I said, we are only hearing about the tip of the iceberg.

The Russians clearly went all in to discredit Hillary Clinton, and help Donald Trump get elected.

It is becoming impossible to believe that there was not some sort of deal made with the Trump campaign. 

According to Facebook as many as ten million people saw those Russia linked ads.

Courtesy of Time Magazine: 

Facebook said that the 3,000 Russia-linked advertisements it turned over to congressional investigators on Monday were seen on the social network by an estimated 10 million people in the United States. 

The social media company said 44% of the ads were seen before the 2016 presidential election, and 56% of the ads were seen after the election. 

Facebook turned over the ads this week in the midst of public scrutiny over its role in spreading "fake news" stories that critics say might have influenced the outcome of the election. Russia created fake accounts on Facebook and bought ads with the goal of spreading false stories. And last month, Facebook said nearly 500 accounts that originated in Russia purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads during the 2016 election.

Well that's disturbing.

And what is more disturbing is that Facebook just handed them the tools to pull it off.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election. 

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists. 

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

We can blame Facebook for their part in this, that is fair, but we also have to recognize that none of this would have been possible if the American people had not proven to be so susceptible to manipulation.

Now I know from experience that a number of you will say that this is the reason you don't go on Facebook, or use other types of social media, but that misses the point of all this.

It does not solve one single problem that you yourself don't use Facebook, because you are only one person and in the grand scheme of things your choice matters not at all.

The real problem is that multiple millions of people DO use Facebook, and THEY either need to be better educated or Facebook needs to protect them from manipulation.

That second one will simply never happen, because our entire capitalist way of life depends on the ability to manipulate people into buying certain products, adopting new technologies, and trying to live a lifestyle that advertisers convince them is more desirable than the one they are already living.

So that means we are left attempting to educate those who are likely targets of the kind of manipulation that puts people like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin into office.

And that my friends does NOT mean abandoning Facebook. It means sharing factual, informative articles on all social media platforms in an attempt to offset the fake news that is already much too readily available.

Keep in mind that if you are not part of the solution, then you remain part of the problem.

DOJ seeking information concerning anti-Trump Facebook users.

Courtesy of Law Newz:  

The ACLU-DC is trying to stop three search warrants that’d let the Department of Justice snoop around protesters’ Facebook accounts over Inauguration Day protests. They filed in D.C. Superior Court on Thursday, saying the government’s demands violate the Fourth Amendment because they are so broad, and threatening First Amendment speech. These warrants ask for too much information not directly relevant to the federal probe, argues the ACLU. This includes information on the plaintiffs’ friends, associates, and the approximately 6000 individuals who just “liked” an anti-Donald Trump Facebook page. 

Requested data would go back to Nov. 1, 2016, a week before the presidential election. “The warrants make no provision for avoiding or minimizing invasions into personal and associational/expression information, for preventing such information from being shared widely within the government, or for destroying irrelevant material when the investigation is concluded,” said the ACLU filing. In other words, this might chill First Amendment speech by giving the government means to observe anyone who were simply linked to anti-Trump protesters. 

This fight stems from arrests made Jan. 20. Demonstrators came to Washington D.C. to protest President Donald Trump‘s inauguration, and over 200 ended up getting charged with felony rioting. In investigating the alleged criminality, the federal government later got three search warrants from the D.C. Superior Court against three Facebook accounts: the disruptj20 page (now known as Resist This) owned by Emmelia Talarico, and personal accounts owned by Lacy MacAuley, and Legba Carrefour. According to the ACLU, these people didn’t initially know about warrants because of a gag order. Facebook fought this gag order, which was later dropped by the government shortly before the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled on it. Talarico, MacAuley, and Carrefour hadn’t even been charged with Inauguration Day-related arrested by the US Attorney, said the ACLU. 

The DOJ declined to comment.

Well on the plus side the Trump Administration seems to finally be recognizing "domestic terrorism," but on the negative side they seem to think that domestic terrorism includes people who "like" a page that says mean things about Orange Hitler.

At this point I am afraid that the outcome of all this attention being paid to Russia's use of social media to impact our election will be that the Trump Department of Justice can then use it to make Facebook and Twitter hand over user information that can then be used to go after critics of the administration.

As much as I want something to be done to protect our democracy from hostile foreign governments using social media to alter the outcome of elections, I have absolutely no confidence that Trump and his lackeys will not use any governmental control provided to them for their own nefarious plans.

After all the greatest threat to the future of this country does not reside in the Kremlin, it resides in the White House.

Twitter may have been even more damaging to our democracy in 2016 than Facebook.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

For three weeks, a harsh spotlight has been trained on Facebook over its disclosure that Russians used fake pages and ads, designed to look like the work of American activists, to spread inflammatory messages during and since the presidential campaign. 

But there is evidence that Twitter may have been used even more extensively than Facebook in the Russian influence campaign last year. In addition to Russia-linked Twitter accounts that posed as Americans, the platform was also used for large-scale automated messaging, using “bot” accounts to spread false stories and promote news articles about emails from Democratic operatives that had been obtained by Russian hackers.

Twitter has struggled for years to rein in the fake accounts overrunning its platform. Unlike Facebook, the service does not require its users to provide their real name (or at least a facsimile of one) and allows automated accounts — arguing that they are a useful tool for tasks such as customer service. Beyond those restrictions, there is also an online black market for services that can allow for the creation of large numbers of Twitter bots, which can be controlled by a single person while still being difficult to distinguish from real accounts. 

Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.

Facebook has been receiving the lion's share of the attention concerning the Kremlin using social media to manipulate American voters and spread misinformation, and certainly they played a big part, but Twitter may have been an even bigger player in the undermining of our democracy.

Courtesy of CNN: 

A social media campaign calling itself "Blacktivist" and linked to the Russian government used both Facebook and Twitter in an apparent attempt to amplify racial tensions during the U.S. presidential election, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The Twitter account has been handed over to Congress; the Facebook account is expected to be handed over in the coming days. 

Both Blacktivist accounts, each of which used the handle Blacktivists, regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage. "Black people should wake up as soon as possible," one post on the Twitter account read. "Black families are divided and destroyed by mass incarceration and death of black men," another read. The accounts also posted videos of police violence against African Americans. 

The Blacktivist accounts provide further evidence that Russian-linked social media accounts saw racial tensions as something to be exploited in order to achieve the broader Russian goal of dividing Americans and creating chaos in U.S. politics during a campaign in which race repeatedly became an issue.

Apparently there was no group that the Russians did not find a way to manipulate.

And I mean NO group.

Did you know there are 200+ more fake antifa? See list w/ IDs and names. https://t.co/6ucY1soXll cc @RVAwonk pic.twitter.com/BTonwS2258

— OperationWolverines (@OpWolverines) September 27, 2017

Clearly the Russians recognized divisions within the country, and exploited as many of them as they could in order to disrupt our ability to get along with each other and to undermine any chances of communicating openly and honestly.

There are super villains in comic books who had less devious schemes.

During 2016 election the Russians apparently used Facebook to try and set up pro-Trump rallies in 17 Florida cities.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned. 

The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump. 

The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

It seems like almost everyday we are learning just how involved Facebook was in helping Russian operatives hijack this election. 

I have a feeling that we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Robert Mueller investigators are very interested in whether Jared Kushner helped the Russians locate and target certain Americans as vulnerable to social media propaganda.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.” 

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Yeah Kushner essentially could not wait to brag about how he had used technology to target likely Trump voters, of course this was before all the talk about Russian interference made the front page.

Now he does not seem quite so anxious to toot his own horn about how he used technology to identify these potential Trump supporters.

If I were a betting man I would bet that Kushner knew all along that his data was being used by the Russians to flood the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of certain poorly educated Americans in order to influence their vote.

And I really hope that will be proven someday soon.

Online advertising makes the spreading of fake news as easy as tying your shoes.

Courtesy of Bloomberg: 

The intentional spreading of false stories has been credited with swaying such monumental events as last year's Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election. Tech firms such as Alphabet Inc. unit Google and Facebook Inc. have been trying to find ways to weed it out, or at least help users spot it. Some say we need to start earlier, educating children on how to think critically. 

But understanding the unique epidemiology of fake news may be no less important. Unlike a typical virus, purveyors of falsehood don't have to infect people at random. Thanks to the wealth of information available on social media and the advent of targeted advertising, they can go straight for the most susceptible and valuable victims -- those most likely to spread the infection. 

This insight emerges from a recent study by network theorists Christoph Aymanns, Jakob Foerster and Co-Pierre Georg, who ran computer simulations of the way fake news moves through social networks. Using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, they examined how individuals might learn to recognize false news, and sought to identify the most important factors in helping fake news spread. 

They found that the most important catalyst of fake news was the precision with which the purveyor targeted an audience -- a task that can easily be accomplished using the data that tech companies routinely gather and sell to advertisers. The key was to seed an initial cluster of believers, who would share or comment on the item, recommending it to others through Twitter or Facebook. False stories spread farther when they were initially aimed at poorly informed people who had a hard time telling if a claim was true or false. 

Hence, we've unwittingly engineered a social media environment that is inherently prone to fake news epidemics. When marketers use information on surfing habits, opinions and social connections to aim ads at people with just the right interests, this can facilitate beneficial economic exchange. But in the wrong hands, the technology becomes a means for the precision seeding of propaganda.

I read through the entire article and to sum it up in a few words, we're fucked.

It seems the only possible long tern solution to this problem is to convince people to stay off social media entirely, and we know that ain't happening.

Or to dramatically improve our education system.

What was that first one again?

Joel Osteen claims he did not open his megachurch to flood victims until he was shamed on social media because the city did not ask him to.

Not even Jesus would buy into this and he's the forgiving sort pic.twitter.com/LBnnHIKRAh

— Michele (@inthefade) August 30, 2017

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Pastor Joel Osteen can’t seem to get his story straight about why he didn’t offer his 16,800-seat megachurch in Houston as a shelter sooner for those displaced by Hurricane Harvey. 

During an appearance on NBC’s “TODAY” show Wednesday, the head of Lakewood Church said its doors have “always been open.” Minutes later, he appeared to reverse course and admit that the church hadn’t initially encouraged victims to seek shelter there.

WATCH: “We were just being precautious, but the main thing is the city didn’t ask us to become a shelter then.” -Pastor @JoelOsteen pic.twitter.com/Qdn5vgm09H

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) August 30, 2017

“If people were here, they’d realize there were safety issues,” Osteen said during the TV appearance. “We were just being precautious, but the main thing is the city didn’t ask us to become a shelter then.”

Dozens of Houston-area churches, schools and community centers opened their doors to offer temporary shelter to survivors as Hurricane Harvey pummeled the city earlier this week.

First off "precautious" is not a word.

And secondly what a load of bullshit.

For several days this Lakewood Church and its pastor were shamed on social media to open their doors and help those who desperately needed a warm dry place to stay.

Only THEN did they do anything to help.

Did Jesus refuse to multiply the loaves and fishes until somebody called him out on Twitter?

Did Moses only part the Red Sea after being shamed for sitting on his ass on Instagram?

Actually neither of those things actually happened, but you get my point.

If you are going to call yourself a Christian, and preach to people that they should love and care for each other, while accepting millions of dollars in donations, then shouldn't you at least PRETEND that you embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ?