According to a federal indictment unveiled on Friday, Russians who pretended to be Americans while participating in online political discourse during the last few years committed a bunch of felonies.
The crimes described in the indictment, which names 13 Russians associated with the so-called Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, include fraud and identity theft as well as violations of immigration law, campaign finance rules, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The New York Times, which last year breathlessly claimed that "Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics," reports that Donald Trump's "Admirers and detractors" both agree with him that "The Russians intended to sow chaos" and "Have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." A Times editorial assures skeptics that "The Russian subversion effort" was "Sophisticated" and "Breathtaking" in scope.
That analysis is at odds with the paper's own reporting, which describes Russian trolls as "Sloppy" and "Amateurish" bumblers who sounded suspiciously like foreigners while posing as Americans, left a trail that made it easy to catch them, and produced crude propaganda that amounted to a drop in the raging river of online political speech.
In 2016, the Times reports, "a dozen people" attended an IRA-orchestrated "Stop the Islamization of Texas" rally in Houston, while a simultaneous counterprotest, also organized by the Russians, attracted "a far larger crowd." Two dozen?
Richard Salgado, Google's senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were "Uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort." The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, "Mostly had low view counts," with less than 3 percent attracting more than 5,000 views.
Salgado nevertheless deemed the Russian content "a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy." If our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it was already doomed.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/02/21/dont-feed-the-russian-troll-hysteria
The crimes described in the indictment, which names 13 Russians associated with the so-called Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, include fraud and identity theft as well as violations of immigration law, campaign finance rules, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The New York Times, which last year breathlessly claimed that "Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics," reports that Donald Trump's "Admirers and detractors" both agree with him that "The Russians intended to sow chaos" and "Have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." A Times editorial assures skeptics that "The Russian subversion effort" was "Sophisticated" and "Breathtaking" in scope.
That analysis is at odds with the paper's own reporting, which describes Russian trolls as "Sloppy" and "Amateurish" bumblers who sounded suspiciously like foreigners while posing as Americans, left a trail that made it easy to catch them, and produced crude propaganda that amounted to a drop in the raging river of online political speech.
In 2016, the Times reports, "a dozen people" attended an IRA-orchestrated "Stop the Islamization of Texas" rally in Houston, while a simultaneous counterprotest, also organized by the Russians, attracted "a far larger crowd." Two dozen?
Richard Salgado, Google's senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were "Uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort." The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, "Mostly had low view counts," with less than 3 percent attracting more than 5,000 views.
Salgado nevertheless deemed the Russian content "a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy." If our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it was already doomed.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/02/21/dont-feed-the-russian-troll-hysteria
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