{"id":7596,"date":"2017-11-02T08:43:44","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T14:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7596"},"modified":"2017-11-02T10:18:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T16:18:12","slug":"russian-troll-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/11\/russian-troll-farm.html","title":{"rendered":"About the Russian Troll Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-3884\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2016\/02\/A_fist-fight_between_Lord_Brougham_and_Lord_Melbourne_as_Pea_Wellcome_V0050236-1024x776.jpg\" alt=\"V0050236 A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Pea Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http:\/\/wellcomeimages.org A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Peachum and Lockit. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1837. 1837 By: John DoylePublished: 22 October 1836 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/\" width=\"1024\" height=\"776\"><\/p>\n<p>So remember that scene from The Avengers where the Loki says some things to various of the Avengers that ultimately cause them to start squabbling with each other, with the end result that Banner turns into the Hulk and starts destroying everything in sight?\u00a0 Or something like that, anyway.\u00a0 For the first year or two after my kids were given this DVD as a Christmas present, they turned to it for any Family Movie Night where there wasn\u2019t anything appealing at the Redbox, but it\u2019s been a while now.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I was thinking of this in reading the latest reports about Russian \u201ctroll farm\u201d activity.\u00a0 The Russians, we now know, were not actively taking the side of either Trump or Clinton, but had created fake groups with messages in support or opposition of both candidates.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2017\/11\/01\/media\/russian-facebook-ads-release-house-intelligence-committee\/index.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">CNN features<\/a> some sample ads\/groups from the recently-released information:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cDonald Trump America\u201d called for Clinton to be removed from the ballot because she represented a claim to a dynasty that was anti-democratic.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cBlack Matters\u201d featured black men shot by police and said \u201cjoin us because we care.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cUnited Muslims of America\u201d called for Muslims to support Clinton.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cArmy of Jesus,\u201d which, so help me, I think my mom has shared, had an ad showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus with the claim that Satan supports Clinton.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And the <a href=\"http:\/\/thehill.com\/policy\/technology\/358025-thousands-attended-protest-organized-by-russians-on-facebook\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">most fascinating item<\/a> was that the BlackMattersUS group actually organized an anti-Trump protest which resulted in between 5,000 \u2013 10,000 people marching from New York\u2019s Union Square to Trump Tower.<\/p>\n<p>What was the purpose of all this?\u00a0 Here is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2017-10-26\/why-clinton-camp-s-funding-of-the-trump-dossier-matters\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Leonid Bershidsky<\/a> writing at Bloomberg View:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Now that the nature of Russian activity on social networks has come to light, it\u2019s likelier than ever that the goal of the whole exercise was to sow discord and instability in the U.S.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is, to be sure, one sentence in an article largely focused on the whole issue of the dossier, who funded it, who colluded with the Russians, etc.<\/p>\n<p>But here\u2019s the deal:<\/p>\n<p>Politicians are calling for Facebook, in the wake of these revelations, to require any sort of political ad to reveal its funding sources and sponsors.\u00a0 And I suppose that\u2019s fine, although in a context when I, as a blogger, could just as easily buy an ad to promote my Jane the Actuary Facebook page, and it would look just like this, and, what\u2019s more, when these ads are not necessarily \u201ccampaign ads\u201d in a traditional sense, that might be easier said than done.<\/p>\n<p>But consider that, <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2017\/10\/30\/democrat-ad-va-governor-race-depicts-gillespie-supporters-racist-murderers\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">in the Virginia governor\u2019s race<\/a>, an ad sponsored by the Latino Victory Project in support of the Democratic candidate portrayed supporters of Republican Ed Gillespie as so racist that they wanted to mow down minority children with their Confederate-flagged pick-up trucks.\u00a0 This makes the\u00a0various examples of\u00a0Russian troll farm ads seem tame in comparison.<\/p>\n<p>It seems to me that either we (collectively, Americans) are a bunch of suckers for the Russians\u00a0to have been able to do this in the first place, and\/or we are so fractured as a country that we were ripe for the picking, and so much so that these ads were pretty much lost in the overall din of the shouting back and forth anyway.\u00a0 Which is, in its own way, as embarrassing a revelation about where we are as a country as when we get those reports about poor test scores, or worse, the ones where American kids think they\u2019re top performers at math and actually are middling at best \u2014 and is a greater long-term problem than the issue of whether the Trump and\/or Clinton campaign had hoped to get salacious dirt on their opponent from the Russians.<\/p>\n<p>And now it\u2019s time to punch back to the figurative time clock.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Image:\u00a0\u00a0V0050236 A fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Pea<br>\nCredit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images<br>\nimages@wellcome.ac.uk<br>\nhttp:\/\/wellcomeimages.org<br>\nA fist-fight between Lord Brougham and Lord Melbourne as Peachum and Lockit. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1837.<br>\n1837 By: John DoylePublished: 22 October 1836<br>\nCopyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So remember that scene from The Avengers where the Loki says some things to various of the Avengers that ultimately cause them to start squabbling with each other, with the end result that Banner turns into the Hulk and starts destroying everything in sight?\u00a0 Or something like that, anyway.\u00a0 For the first year or two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":3884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[769],"class_list":["post-7596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-russian-trolls"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>About the Russian Troll Farm<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So remember that scene from The Avengers where the Loki says some things to various of the Avengers that ultimately cause them to start squabbling with\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/11\/russian-troll-farm.html\" \/>\n<meta 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