General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Bernie cannot come to the cookout. Sorry, not sorry. [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,912 posts)Last edited Sat Apr 7, 2018, 10:54 AM - Edit history (1)
Strongly anti-Hillary Clinton views were no doubt sincerely held by many also during the 2016 campaign. While if pressed I can still defend what I feel were some legitimate criticisms of Hillary Clinton at the time, I know that malicious agents were pouring sewage into our political debates, turning some arguably (debatable) less than ideal aspects of her political identity into a grotesque caricature of political malevolence
What does election meddling actually mean? At root it means stirring the pot, any pot that can be made to boil over. It means inflaming sore points that quite often are legitimate in origin, until they become infected and ultimately toxic to the body politic.
I am a strong backer of Black Lives Matter. I credit that movement with helping to open my own eyes to a horror that I as a white man did not sufficiently recognize prior to it's emergence. Black Lives Matter is not "too extreme". Black Lives Matter is not intrinsically divisive. Black Lives Matter is fucking right and was decades overdue. That does not make it immune from attempts to exploit it by some with ulterior motives.
There are forces in this world that want nothing more than to see Americans divided, and they will play any angle, mimic any position, and assume any identity needed to pursue that agenda. And very good people, very good Americans with justifiably strong grievances, are not immune to attempts at manipulation, That means all of us, myself included. It is important that we all be vigilant against efforts to unjustifiably turn ourselves against each other. That fits into a different agenda than the one that animates our true passons.
Here is a cautionary tale. I will simply leave it here for reflection:
Russian Trolls Stoked Anger Over Black Lives Matter More Than Was Previously Known
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/russian-trolls-hyped-anger-over-black-lives-matter-more-than-previously-known/
"...In data collected over a nine-month period ending in October 2016, the UW team found clearly defined left-leaning and right-leaning clustersabout 10,000 accounts in each spheretweeting about police shootings and including the three hashtags related to #BlackLivesMatter. Two of the Russian accounts found were among the top 12 most-retweeted accounts overall across all 20,000 accounts. This suggests that troll content was relatively widely broadcasted in the contexts of this network, the research team wrote in their findings. On both sides, we see troll accounts gaining traction in polarized, audience-driven discourse.
Its striking how systematic the trolls were, says Ahmer Arif, one of the researchers on the study. The operation, he says, was sophisticated enough to exploit both sides: The content theyre sharing is tailored to align to each audiences preferences.