Considering there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into either side of the campaign I'd question the source of any online comment taking a highly partisan position that perfectly fits into party lines. Could be either direct 50-cent armies [1] style astroturfing or regular people influenced by other comments fed elsewhere online, or worse, articles fed to reputable news sites.
Even GCHQ docs from the Snowden leaks showed that five eyes have been successfully experimenting with controlling online conversations since at least 2012. So it's definitely doable with a dedicated team.
This is modern PR. Another thing that sites like HN/reddit increasingly have to contend with to keep content authentic and quality...
If they only commented on their leaks, that would be one thing, you can't really blame them for not having any Trump documents. But they've given extensive commentary on the email scandal and the FBI investigation, which frankly have nothing to do with their leaks.
I don't doubt there are similar efforts on the part of the GOP or Donald Trump supporters.
Bernie Sanders was subject to vicious propaganda and a generally adversarial mass-media, then when the Democratic nomination was "clinched" by Hillary a sudden swelling of negative media stories on the Green Party's Jill Stein and Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson filled the media channels.
Up until that point, they received almost no media coverage.
This has been the nastiest and most manipulative Presidential election I can remember, though I am only 37 so take that as you will. One thing is certain, hard-core progressives and leftists now know for certain what the DNC and Democrats are really about, and how low they will go to accomplish that.
Recently!!!?
Just to bring you back to planet Earth, all the latest polls show the two major candidates in dead heat.
There's never been any doubt that most white Americans will vote for Trump. The Democrats haven't won whites since 1964. The Civil Rights Act ended that possibility. The big question is whether Trump will overwhelmingly win whites, or just comfortably win whites.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/n...
True. I don't advertise this, but I really have a difficult time respecting anyone who would vote for a major party presidential candidate (unless they live in a swing state). It's either a misunderstanding of the longer-term game theory involved or a lack of willingness to risk being on the losing side.
Combine that with the fact that most people don't want Trump to win, so they're automatically on Clinton's side, and with Clinton's deflection of the DNC hack documents that pointed to election rigging towards who hacked the DNC, and that anti-Wikileaks campaign is suddenly a lot more effective.
So now when other sites write about Wikileaks it's usually from the "Here's 3 more ways in which Wikileaks did something bad" angle.
I so wish the U.S. moved to a proportional representation/multi-party system sooner rather than later. I'm so sick and tired of their extremely partisan crap. It seems to make everything worse off. The partisan reality-distortion fields are getting bigger and more powerful than Apple's in the Steve Jobs era.