Republican voters

[SHRED]

Many, if not all, don't even know what the ACA (Obamacare) law is or does. They couldn't care less about the details.

They've just been fed Fox News type propaganda so they are against it and want it repealed.
I read their responses online and they are fucking insane.

[Charles Bukowski]

1. Speaking of online responses, i never believed that paid trolls were an actual thing.

Until ACA.

The law of averages tells us that millions of conservatives have benefited greatly from Obamacare, particularly with the expansion of medicaid, yet every right-wing hack online tells the SAME story of how their premiums tripled and quadrupled for similar or worse coverage.

Every. Single. Last. One. Tells the same fucking story, with little deviation.

That's when I knew something was up.

[Grey Lemercier]

2. Invasion of the troll armies: from Russian Trump supporters to Turkish state stooges

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-social-media-trump-russian

We don’t know who they are, or what their mission is. We only know that there are thousands of them out there, pretending to be us. They may be at home, or in special offices, or sitting beside you on the train. They use social media, and write blogs and comments. Some of them may visit the bottom of this article.

You can hire your own troll army if you have the cash. In 2011 the PR firm Bell Pottinger told undercover journalists that they could “create and maintain third-party blogs”, and spruce up Wikipedia profiles and Google search rankings. Indeed marketing has a rich history of so-called “astroturfing”, which is laying down fake grassroots. Take Forest, “the voice and friend of the smoker”, which at least admits in nearly invisible small print that it is paid for by the tobacco industry.

Now, however, manipulating social media has become part of the business of government. It may yet influence how governments are formed. Recent reports suggest that many of Donald Trump’s most fervent online supporters are not themselves Americans, but Russians being paid by their government to help him win. One told Samantha Bee that she pretends to be a housewife from Nebraska. Why she would confess it now is unexplained, but when you look around it begins to feel like everybody does it. It’s just that no two countries’ methods are the same.

China

The existence of the wumao dang or “50 Cent Party” is not a secret in China, but then it is hard to employ up to two million people secretly. Even the state-owned Global Times reported with approval on the practice in 2010, citing Changsha’s party office as the source of the name after it paid a team of commenters 600 yuan a month in 2004, plus half a yuan – hence “50 cent” – for each glowing post they made.

snip


It looks like Russia hired internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump Americans

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/russia-internet-trolls-and-donald-trump-2016-7?r=US&IR=T


It looks like Russia hired internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump Americans. Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.

"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.

Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."

snip


Covert online students hasbara units directed out of Israeli PM Netanyau’s office

http://mondoweiss.net/2013/08/covert-online-students-hasbara-units-directed-out-of-israeli-pm-netanyaus-office/

Israel’s Public Diplomacy Ministry is closing. Instead, staff at the Prime Minister’s office (PMO) will be directing covert “diplomacy units” from Israel’s top universities to counter the growing threat of isolation, the effects of the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). A recent article in Haaretz explained the recruitment was “to combat the boycott of Israel” on the social networks. The “public face” of these units is intended to be “one of an independent student entity.” Reportedly, investment in the recruitment, training and funding of these covert student units, structured in a “semi-military fashion”, is NIS 3 million.

Haaretz reports Prime Minister’s Office recruiting students to wage online hasbara battles:

The Prime Minister’s Office is planning to form, in collaboration with the National Union of Israeli Students, “covert units” within Israel’s seven universities that will engage in online public diplomacy (hasbara)………..Sources in the Prime Minister’s Office said the main subjects that the campus-based units will deal with are diplomatic- and security-related issues, efforts to combat the boycott of Israel and anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel………

Seaman informed the public tender committee that the Prime Minister’s Office was interested in having the student union recruit up to 550 students with knowledge of foreign languages from Israel’s seven universities. The student union is to publicize the project among tens of thousands of students and be responsible for the screening process, which will include submission of resumes, submitting answers to questionnaires, providing translation samples and participating in individual interviews. It is also the student union that is to provide computers and work space for a project headquarters on each campus…….. “The idea requires that the state’s role not be highlighted…….”

It is apparent from Seaman’s document that a diplomacy group will be set up at each university and structured in a semi-military fashion. The head of the unit will be a student “senior coordinator,” who will receive a full scholarship from the Prime Minister’s Office. Working under the senior coordinator will be three other student coordinators, each of whom will head one of three desks, responsible for languages, graphics and research. These coordinators will get smaller scholarships. A group of student activists, who will receive nominal student stipends, will work under each coordinator. The Prime Minister’s Office will fund a total of NIS 2.78 million in scholarships for the program in the upcoming academic year.

snip


EXPOSED: Astroturfed Teabaggers PAID TO TROLL liberals online to enforce corporate propaganda (2010)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/12/29/932182/-

There is a reason Markos Moulitsas is not allowed on MSNBC but Pat Buchanan is.

This is from an amazing article on the corporatist astroturfing ingrained in our media and politics that I found on Alternet. It details current Chinese and Western Neo-Corporate paid astroturfed trolling online.

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organized by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to "manipulate the medium". This is what he told them:

. . . The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to "manipulate the medium". This is what he told them:

"Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in "Liberal Books". I go through and I say "one star, one star, one star". The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. ... This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in "Movies on Healthcare", I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. ... If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance."

Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m(13). A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.

(Astro)Turf Wars - Tea Party Documentary