Russian disinformation campaign was shrewd in its use of trolls, who are people often hired to push certain types of content, and bots, which are automated accounts that can be programmed to post particular types of messages to amplify the spread of favored narratives.Bots and trolls are most effective, experts say, when they find ways to interact online with actual people — an especially those with large followings.“By getting a celebrity or someone famous to retweet what a bot or troll network is sending out gives an illusion of legitimacy and allows it to get picked up by the broader public,” said Samuel C. Woolley, an online propaganda researcher and research director at the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank.Hayes, the MSNBC host, linked to an @Ten_GOP tweet, calling it “the best #EarthDay tweet so far.” The original tweet said, “Nothing says more about environmental ‘activists’ at #MarchForScience than piles of trash they left behind. #EarthDay.” It showed pictures of two overflowing garbage cans.“I vaguely remember the tweet being pretty bonkers and thought it was the actual Tennessee GOP account because of the name,” Hayes said.Coulter retweeted @Ten_GOP content in March on the way Trump’s handling of U.S. attorneys was being portrayed by news reports. Actor James Woods retweeted @Ten_GOP several times, including one from February in which Woods added the words above the link, “Paris resonates with the sweet sound of Islamist terrorism.”
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What Happened in Niger that got 4 U.S. Green Berets killed?
PalmerReport: Donald Trump has spent the past two weeks doing his best to avoid addressing the four U.S. soldiers who died in Niger on October 4th. The headlines up to now have focused on Trump’s unwillingless to call the families of those soldiers or even publicly acknowledge their deaths. The real scandal, as it turns out, is why he’s been dodging it: he’s afraid to call any attention to the U.S. military action in Niger, because it was actually a Russian military op.
Maddow: Trump not wanting to talk about what happened in Niger makes me really want to know what happened in Niger. https://t.co/ukIrrCjs81
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) October 19, 2017
Follow the timeline: on August 10th, the governments of Niger and Russia signed a military cooperation deal. The press release from Russian news agency TASS described it as being a vaguely defined anti-terrorism partnership (link), but in real world terms, the deal was almost certainly about the exploding oil production in Niger. It’s roughly the same kind of arrangement which Russia has long had with the Syrian government: Russia provides military protection in order to help keep the current regime in power, and in return, the regime sells cheap oil back to Russia. Just seven weeks after the deal was signed, as Russia was moving in to set up shop in Niger, four U.S. soldiers were suddenly killed there.
Benghazi
4 Americans die
7 probes
5 years of partisan outrage#NigerAmbush
4 U.S. Green Berets killed
0 Acknowledgement#PartisanPatriotism http://pic.twitter.com/Qaz1X2sWpH— Brenna Simon (@BrennaSimonSays) October 15, 2017
Even setting aside Donald Trump’s personal allegiance to Russian President Vladimir Putin, from a purely tactical standpoint, there is zero chance that the United States would have been running its own military op inside Niger while Russia was moving in to set up shop. The only logically possible explanation is that the U.S. secretly sent troops to help the Russian military with its efforts in Niger. In other words, those four U.S. soldiers were participating in some kind of Russian military op – and it only became public once they died.
Rachel Maddow reported on-air on Wednesday night that Donald Trump nixed a prepared statement mourning the loss of the four U.S. soldiers. We also know that Trump didn’t call the families of those four soldiers until the media called him out on it. It’s become clear that Trump and his regime really didn’t want the public or the media to focus on the military op in Niger – which we know had to have been a Russian op – hence he refused to even mention it or make any calls. Trump got four U.S. soldiers killed by lending out the U.S. military to Vladimir Putin, and now he’s desperate to keep the details from coming out. We all know why.
Opinion | How the Russians pretended to be Texans — and Texans believed them
(Image from Facebook)
Casey Michel is a journalist based in New York.
In early 2016, while researching some of the most popular U.S. secession groups online, I stumbled across one of the Russian-controlled Facebook accounts that were then pulling in Americans by the thousands.
At the time, I was writing on Russia’s relationship with American secessionists from Texas, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. These were people who had hitched flights to Moscow to swap tactics, to offer advice and to find support. They had found succor in the shadow of the Kremlin.
That was how I eventually found my way to the “Heart of Texas” Facebook page (and its @itstimetosecede Twitter feed as well). Heart of Texas soon grew into the most popular Texas secession page on Facebook — one that, at one point in 2016, boasted more followers than the official Texas Democrat and Republican Facebook pages combined. By the time Facebook took the page down recently, it had a quarter of a million followers.
The page started slowly — just a few posts per week. Unlike other secession sites I’d come across, this one never carried any contact information, never identified any of the individuals behind the curtain. Even as it grew, there was nothing to locate it in Texas — or anywhere else, for that matter. It was hard to escape the suspicion that there might be Russian involvement here as well.
There were other oddities about the site. Its organizers had a strangely one-dimensional idea of its subject. They seemed to think, for example, that Texans drank Dr. Pepper at all hours: while driving their giant trucks, while flying their Confederate battle flags, while griping about Yankees and liberals and vegetarians.
But Heart of Texas, sadly, was no joke. At one point the page’s organizers even managed to stir up its followers into staging an armed, anti-Islamic protest in Houston. As gradually became clear, this was part of a broader strategy. The sponsors of the page were keen to exacerbate America’s own internal divisions. At certain moments they lent support to Black Lives Matter, while in others they would play to the latent (or obvious) racism of Donald Trump’s base.
By the summer of 2016, other themes began to emerge. Posts began to follow a perceptibly hard-right course, stressing Texas’s status as a “Christian state,” or touting the Second Amendment as a “symbol of freedom … so we would forever be free from any tyranny.” Some of the page’s contributors talked about the need to “keep Texas Texan,” whatever that meant. There was also a generous dollop of conspiracy theory. There were posts about the allegedly unnatural death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the supposed federal invasion orders behind the Jade Helm military exercise. Fake Founding Father quotes mingled with anti-Muslim screeds and paeans to Sam Houston. And the number of followers steadily crept into the hundreds of thousands.
Though the site’s authors understood their audience well, there was something off about their writing. The page’s “About” section proclaimed that “Texas’s the land protected by Lord [sic].” Grammatical and spelling glitches were everywhere: “In Love With Texas Shape,” “State Fair of Texas – Has You Already Visited?,” “Always Be Ready for a Texas Size,” “No Hypoclintos in the God Blessed Texas.” (Or take this caption for a photo of country music star George Strait: “Life is not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breth [sic] away.”) Yet the typos never seemed to raise any suspicions in readers’ minds.
Even the page’s calls for an early November protest across the state – part pro-secession, part anti-Clinton — were garbled. One post declared that “we are free citizens of Texas and we’ve had enough of this cheap show on the screen.” The site called on those who showed up to “make photos.”
Heart of Texas chugged on after the election, bringing in tens of thousands of new followers in 2017 who were unbothered by its mangled English, its rank nativism and its calls to break up the United States.
And then, in August, it was gone. Just like that, the most popular Texas secession page on Facebook was revealed to be a Russian front, operated by the notorious Internet Research Agency, with Facebook removing all of the posts from public view. (It’s worth noting that another Instagram account started posting Heart of Texas material as soon as the original Facebook page was taken down.)
Despite its claims of transparency, Facebook has effectively prevented the public from examining these posts and these pages. So far Heart of Texas remains the only example of a Russian account that I and other researchers managed to study in detail before Facebook pulled the rug out from underneath it.
We know that the Russians behind these sites played all of their readers, and especially those who showed up at its protests in places like Twin Falls and Fort Myers and Houston, for fools. Considering that the number of their combined followers ranged into the millions — with some estimates placing total views potentially in the billions — they’re probably right.
The creators of Heart of Texas not only targeted the sociopolitical tensions within the United States. They also exploited our gullibility, which turned out to be far greater than I could have ever imagined. And by assisting them in this massive lie, Facebook has enabled one of the greatest frauds in recent American history.
The Netanyahu government went off the rails this weekend
In under 24 hours, Netanyahu and his cronies attacked left-wing NGOs, tried to shut down Israel’s public broadcaster, and starting advancing a law that would give the prime minister immunity for corruption charges.
By Yossi Dahan
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly government conference at the PM’s office in Jerusalem, October 15, 2017. (Alex Kolomoisky/Flash90)
What transpired in the Israeli government over a 24-hour period this past weekend is nothing short of nauseating.
It began with a scathing attack by Prime Minister Netanyahu on top police officials in response to news reports that police renewed the investigations against him in a number of corruption scandals. Netanyahu attacked the national police commissioner for allegedly leaking details of the investigations.
Immediately after that, on Sunday morning, the government approved a new law, allowing ministries to make certain political appointments bypassing normal civil service norms and bidding processes.
Later that day Interior Minister Aryeh Deri (Shas) proposed shutting down the new Israel Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), in order to fund new settler roads in the West Bank, which Netanyahu floated funding with across-the-board cuts. The interior minister could have solved the budget problem in other ways but it turns out what worries him most these days is the months-old public broadcaster’s low ratings.
It is difficult to know whether Deri’s sudden interest in the corporation’s ratings was the result of an investigative report it aired, according to which Israeli police have gathered enough evidence to indict him and his wife for tax offenses, money laundering and breach of trust.
Interior Minister Aryeh Deri speaks during a conference of the Shas Party, Jerusalem, July 30, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Netanyahu said that he will consider Deri’s proposal. Comedic relief came from Communications Minister Ayoub Kara, who wrote on Twitter: “I was happy to receive the prime minister’s blessings to shut down the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, an end to wasting public money.” Kara, who is Netanyahu’s puppet in the Communications Ministry, clearly misread the instructions and quickly erased the Tweet, publishing a clarification that mostly likely came from above.
During that same meeting, the heads of the coalition unanimously agreed to establish a parliamentary committee to investigate foreign government funding of left-wing NGOs, and the involvement of those governments in internal Israeli politics. In order to prevent any surprises, coalition head David Bitan proposed the committee be headed by a member of Knesset from his Likud party. Netanyahu supported this move. Meanwhile, Minister of Tourism Yariv Levin updated the coalition heads on the progress of a new government-supported bill to outlaw left-wing NGOs. At the end of that day, it was revealed that Likud MKs close to Netanyahu are currently promoting a bill that would would effectively extend the prime minister’s parliamentary immunity to corruption charges.
The most common explanation given by commentators for the relentless attacks by Netanyahu and his cronies is that they are trying to terrorize anyone who is directly or indirectly involved in the decision whether to indict him — to make sure he doesn’t stand trial.
The attempts to portray the prime minister as a victim has a long-term goal, however. Going after police investigators, limiting the independence of the courts, violating the media’s independence, politicizing and taking over the civil service, persecuting civil society organizations that work toward social justice and for human rights, and treating Arab citizens as a fifth column — all this so that when the damage is done, if and when he is proven innocent, Netanyahu will be able to continue to rule endlessly, with no investigations or real political opposition. An authoritarian leader in a regime that pretends to be a democracy.
Yossi Dahan is a law professor, the head of the Human Rights Division at the College of Law and Business and the co-founder of Haokets. This article was first published in Hebrew in Yedioth Ahronoth.
Fake website targets Palestine activists
National Students for Justice in Palestine is target of apparent phishing effort.
Ksenia Sobchak – from Russian socialite to Putin’s opponent
Appoint your own “opponent”?
Journalist and former reality TV star Ksenia Sobchak is ready to take on President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s upcoming election. But is she the face of the opposition or a Kremlin-approved critic?
Fallen soldier’s mother says President Donald Trump disrespected her son
The US president is alleged to have told the wife of a soldier killed in action in Niger that her husband “knew what he signed up for.” The soldier’s mother said she was present when Trump made the “insensitive” remarks.
Editorial: Congress, End the Health Care Chaos. You Have 9 Million Kids to Protect.
The Children’s Health Insurance Program has had bipartisan support, as does a compromise to save Obamacare. Republicans could wreck both.
Björk details sex harassment claims against ‘Danish director’
Icelandic music icon Björk on Tuesday detailed her sexual harassment allegations against a “Danish director”, saying he repeatedly stroked and hugged her and whispered unwanted sexual advances in her ear.
Scientists in France say they’ve found a cause of dyslexia – The Local
The team used an LED lamp, flashing so fast that it is invisible to the naked eye, to “cancel” one of the images in the brains of dyslexic trialparticipants while reading.In initial experiments, dyslexic study participants called it the “magic lamp,” said Ropars, but further tests are required to confirm the technique really works.About 700 million people in the world are known to suffer from dyslexia — about one in ten of the global population.
Source: Scientists in France say they’ve found a cause of dyslexia – The Local

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