https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-pr...

RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away?

The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?

http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-isl...

Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."

How do we do that?

This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"?

My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.

I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue.

Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools.

There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.

https://www.rt.com/usa/rt-government-broadcasting-radio/

The seem to be very open about their funding from the Russian government. In fact, comparing it exactly to the BBC.

This does not diminish the case against Russia. They have helped turn a political fringe into a force in the US, France, UK, Poland and elsewhere. Unless you truly believe open society and liberalism is wrong, Russia is throwing a wrench in the works, and deserves to be punished for doing so.

What's your point?

You left that out both times.

It feels like a lot of US folk are still in the blame-somebody-else stage of grieving.

Is it Russia's fault the US electoral college system allows a minority to elect the president?

If an external country convinced 60% of a population to vote against its establishment (and for the sake of argument, their (the voters) own self interest), it is immune from punishment because it convinced a minority?

We now want to punish countries that say different things than Americans agree with? Speaking Pro-Trumps and Anti-Clinton statements is VERY different than false propaganda.

I also doubt that any country in has ever accepted foreign propaganda, Manchurian candidates who subvert their electoral processes (speaking generally, not about any particular candidate) and mass manipulation of its populace (the fact the the US has engaged in this sort of activity does not make it right either).

In any case, freedom of the press is already very robust in the US, unlike some other countries.

Including libelous material?

I've performed my own analysis of election memes and I independently confirmed a staggering amount of Trump-related traffic with significantly above-average upvotes across several major media platforms.

https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/

I wrote this 2 weeks before the election and even then, I was already looking closely at bot/sock puppet activity. I didn't connect everything at the time, but I now view the shockingly pro-Trump traffic in an even-more-skeptical light.

For some, there will never be enough evidence to prove social media were subverted for the purpose of influencing the election. For my purposes, however, I appreciate the PDF linked in this thread because it is actually relevant to my social media research. I am happy to cite the intelligence report as context for the social media findings I reported on.

I do not consider the book to be "closed" on this matter, but I do condemn all the commenters in this thread who are attempting to shut down the conversation by claiming there's not enough "evidence."

In closing, I quote from the report:

> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:

> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

Continuing:

> A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015

I will use those two quotes to provide context for my research.