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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,063 posts)
Mon Mar 26, 2018, 11:05 PM Mar 2018

Obama official: We could have stopped Russian trolls

A former Obama White House official says the US government could have thwarted a Russian troll group's attempts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.

The Kremlin-linked troll group, known as the Internet Research Agency, was charged last month by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Brett Bruen, who served as the White House director of global engagement from 2013 to 2015, said he warned colleagues on President Barack Obama's National Security Council in 2014 that America would be targeted by Russian trolls. His warnings came after he saw how the Russians used the same methods -- social media meddling and propaganda -- to sow discord during Ukraine's election in 2014.

"I was sitting in the Situation Room saying, 'Why do we continue to look at this as an issue that only concerns Ukraine, that only concerns Eastern Europe? This is something that's going to march across Western Europe. This is something that's going to march over to our shores, and we need to be ready,' " Bruen told CNN.

Bruen said he took part in a US government task force to counter the Russian meddling in Ukraine's election. That task force produced fact sheets and videos in response to Russian content and was considered a success, Bruen said. "We actually saw that the Russian bots and the Russian propagandists receded because we were contesting this space, because we were pushing out some pretty effective content."

On the heels of that achievement, in late 2014, Bruen pitched an idea to set up a command center at the US State Department that would similarly track and counter any Russian propaganda targeted at US allies, but officials at State, he said, failed to recognize the threat.

Bruen said State Department officials, and in particular, Victoria Nuland, then the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, did not recognize the danger and dismissed his ideas.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/obama-official-we-could-have-stopped-russian-trolls/ar-BBKJAIr?li=BBnb7Kz

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Obama official: We could have stopped Russian trolls (Original Post) Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Mar 2018 OP
If he had done more Turbineguy Mar 2018 #1
Yep Hekate Mar 2018 #2
So if right wing trolls won't like it, cease and desist? BlueWI Mar 2018 #5
The information being pushed in Ukraine versus US was of different kinds. Igel Mar 2018 #3
There was good warning of the trolls and election hacking... Sancho Mar 2018 #4

Turbineguy

(37,206 posts)
1. If he had done more
Mon Mar 26, 2018, 11:41 PM
Mar 2018

the RW hate machine would have been all over him. He warned us, he told Putin to knock it off.

The Right Wing owns this. They wanted it. They got what they wanted.

BlueWI

(1,736 posts)
5. So if right wing trolls won't like it, cease and desist?
Tue Mar 27, 2018, 08:00 PM
Mar 2018

With that logic, why elect Democrats at all? Some issues are beyond political calculation, and a campaign of foreign interference in free and fair elections is one of those issues. Wouldn't you agree - no matter which party is in power?

Let's learn from the unfortunate results of the 2016 election interference rather than pretend there was only one possible response.

Igel

(35,191 posts)
3. The information being pushed in Ukraine versus US was of different kinds.
Tue Mar 27, 2018, 06:42 AM
Mar 2018

There, it was simply counterfactual. And it had less to do with a electoral campaign and more to do with a cultural and wider political campaign.

Here it was a bit harder since it pushed stories that were already in the press, it pushed ideas and made a whole lot of different claims about various political figures that weren't so much counterfactual as just incomplete.

Take the BLM-related messaging. What was said wasn't false; what was said was true, as far as it went, and inflammatory, pushed to people targeted because it was thought they'd be outraged. The Russian covered merely kept picking at wounds, reminding people to be mad.

Even some of the blatantly false stories that quickly plummeted because they were false, as best I could track them down, went back to US sources, small, partisan, sometimes crackpot periodicals or websites that had no obvious Russian connection. But if they heard a crazy story, they'd be happy to repeat it on RT.

It's also worth noting that a lot of the fake news in Ukraine was picked up and bandied about even in the US for a day or three before it was finally accepted as fake. A column of fascists heading to Crimea, for example. That's easily shown to be false, but there it was, and by the time it was shown false it had done its job.

In other cases the news was never completely rejected. The Azov Battalion, for example, continued to be billed as pretty much a 100% fascist organization when finding evidence of the predicted pogroms never quite happened. Certain individuals were taken as representative of the entire membership, what was true of the founder was true of each member. (Of course, we could have picked non-fascist members and generalized in a way to deny any fascists were in the squad, but that would have made no political point). This was more typical "fake news"--it's not really fake, but truth is used as a weapon to deceive and mask. So as the progressive West churned with outrage over that battalion, however, gays, Jews, Baptists, Tatars were being assaulted and their spaces destroyed by the "anti-fascist" Russian forces in the Donbas, and swastika-sporting entertainment shows celebrated Russian victories.

Sancho

(9,065 posts)
4. There was good warning of the trolls and election hacking...
Tue Mar 27, 2018, 07:07 AM
Mar 2018

not just on DU with all the obvious trolls that were obvious leading up to the 2016 election. On other sites I also saw posts about the hacking of election databases going back long before the primary.

It was the support, collusion, and invitation of the repubs that turned the election into an tRump victory. Treason!

I believe that the US Government was too casual about election interference. We've seen manipulation all the way back to 2000 and hanging chads, DREs, and tabulator games. As I write this, nothing prevents interference with this coming fall voting.

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