I've spent more than the Russians did on Facebook ads, to think that amount of money was a deciding factor is pretty absurd.
Not a US voter, no skin in the game myself (and I would vote neither D nor R anyway), but I find all these excuses to a lost election unconvincing.
A hostile foreign government’s operations to propagandize Americans about politics is important to analyze.
If you haven't heard the hand-wringing over the influence of money in politics in the US, you've literally paid zero attention to any US politics for at least the last, oh, half century. (And the hand-wringing didn't start then, it's just been ubiquitous for about that long; it's really older than the US, since the main line of complaint in the US on that score is basically a continuation of a complaint about the political influence of moneyed special interests that has been repeated fairly consistently, in every generation, since it appeared in The Wealth of Nations.)
OTOH, the problem, while widely viewed a significant, is also widely accepted as a routine and perennial feature of liberal democracy, whereas a foreign influence operation deeply bound up with a domestic Presidential campaign is still considered unusual and extreme.
Original: I’ve seen plenty of concern over citizens United and the unfair influence of money in politics, so you might want to broaden your sources. Your posts remind me of basically what Trump is saying, that evil things that other countries do are fine because we are hypocrites, or other countries attacking us is okay because it’s our fault we’re vulnerable.
Supports my first point. From The Chicago Sun Times, with links: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/president-donald-tru...
And to support my second point, here you go: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/15/trump-russia-hack-...
“The DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked. They had bad defenses, and they were able to be hacked,” Trump said
Almost verbatim what I said, isn’t it?
"I can easily back up what I said about trump. When asked about Putin and Russia killing people, he said the US killed many people (a very well known incident - do I need to google it for you?)
When he spoke just a few days ago, he said that while Russia may have hacked the DNC, they also tried to hack the RNC and didn’t get in due to their superior defenses (which is incidentally false, they did get hacked). And, that it was the Democratic Party’s fault that they had weak protection. Again, a very well known incident analyzed on detail widely in our media - want me to google it for you?
Ha, thanks for quoting me. Gosh, I promise not to edit. This is silly. Your post is pretty much advertising that you don’t know what you’re talking about, but you still down voted me and replied."
There’s a certain method of dispute on discussion forums like this where when someone sees facts that they dislike, they will insist that it has to be cited, from a source hey approve of course! Otherwise they will loudly insist that it is clearly false, because the other person didn’t take all the time to cut and paste a bunch of links and do web searches, as if this is a Wikipedia article or something.
Nothing I posted is even remotely controversial, except perhaps to people who are firmly convinced of the opposite already.
If you feel my statements contained hyperbole or misrepresentation, could you please clarify that? Because I’m not seeing any trace of that in what I said. In your statements, I just see flat denials without no content. In fact, you are misrepresenting the content and character of my statements.
You know what I want to hear about? The wealthy Americans who used Facebook to influence the US election. If Facebook can be used in this way, I think looking at what Russia did is interesting, but it’s not the only story! The story is, people are subtly and quietly influincing our elections! Shouldn’t we look closely at everyone who did that? Not solely the Russian bogeyman?