Arkansas Granny
Arkansas Granny's JournalWe are being defeated in a digital war but there is still time to fight back
Last year, Russia and its allies engineered a rift between truth and lies, fact and fake news, humans and bots – and the bots are winning. They're winning because social-media firms profit from all traffic – whatever the source – and governments are simply too slow to counter this threat.
Add to this the evidence of Russian-backed attacks on key institutions of Western democracy: the European Union and Brexit, the Democratic National Committee and the Podesta e-mails. And top this off with a debilitating attack on the National Security Agency itself by an allegedly Russia-linked group called the Shadow Brokers. We are at "e-war": We've traded bullets for bots, soldiers for coders and the Berlin Wall for a firewall.
Russian disinformation – like its more overt Islamic State cousin – is designed to fuel animosities and exploit existing cleavages. The people behind it are not only hate-filled but also experts on audience segmentation. Although diametrically opposed to each other on social, ethnic, political and religious grounds, Russia and the Islamic State are ironically employing the very same techniques to further their respective agendas.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/we-are-being-defeated-in-a-digital-war-but-there-is-still-time-to-fight-back/article37513436/?__twitter_impression=true
Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo
“I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”
This morning’s presidential Twitter outburst recalls those words of Fredo Corleone’s in one of the most famous scenes from The Godfather series. Trump tweeted that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” and in a subsequent tweet called himself a “very stable genius.”
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Before the Saturday morning tweets, what should have been the biggest story of the week was Trump’s success at mobilizing the Senate and the FBI to deploy criminal prosecution as a weapon against Trump critics. The Senate Judiciary committee—the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!—formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.
The Department of Justice can ignore such a referral. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The FBI has come under relentless abuse from Trump, who complains about its refusal to do his will. Is it now yielding?
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/549875/?__twitter_impression=true
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