But I just don't think its plausible that the identified Russian activities swung the election. The Russian fake news trolls were a drop in the ocean of social media/news. The russia spend on facebook was 0.05 percent of the candidates (not even going to mention the free posting by individual supporters). FB estimated that 1 out of ~20 thousand pieces of "content" it served related to the election was russian.
In order to believe they had an impact, you have to believe russia ads/fake news are almost infinitely more persuasive than other propaganda, ads, news, etc.
It could easily have been a leak, and the Russia story was simply to deflect from the content of the leak.
It seems a bit like blaming the NBCUniversal for leaking the audio tape of trumps lewd conversation about women, rather than trump.
A big question is how influence the three major leaks had on the election, and from an outside perspective it seems insane that the whole US political direction get decided on embarrassing leaks rather than political subjects.
IDK much about much, but that sure does seem questionable to me.
So, I agree with Greenwald that a broken media environment made it possible. But I disagree with him that that casts doubt on Russian involvement, or invalidates Russian activity as a topic of national concern.
(Correct me if I'm wrong; if he's actually disputing the existence of the meddling he'd go down a few notches in my esteem).
https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/statements-about-possibility-...
B. The CONTENT of Podesta’s emails were the problem for Clinton. How much money she took from Wall Street, her public and private opinions depending who she was talking to, the very real pay-to-play “Donations” to her fund while she was Secretary. Her collusion with the media, including asking Trump to be propped up with coverage as a pied piper she “knew” she could beat. Russia didn’t make her do things that looked bad when made public, or make her skip campaigning in key states. I’m a little shocked at how all the hate is directed to the assumed-Russian messenger, when the real problem was she truly was a bad candidate who did bad things. she is responsible for Trump in many ways, yet, people years later still defending her. Makes no sense.
Edit: ok, hide the truth, don’t thank Clinton for Trump even though that’s what happened.
This same person recently founded a company that publicly boasted its tech could "sway" the 2020 election. [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/03/25/596805347/how-does-cambridge-...
But we can do a lot more to ensure our elections are free from foreign influence in the future.
One way might be to do something about the guy going on TV to ask foreign countries to dig up dirt on a rival.
Hillary deleted 30,000 emails after a subpoena was issued. Trump suggested that since other countries had hacked her server they probably had the 30,000 deleted emails and they could turn them over to help the investigation.
“The reality is that for three years there has been a conspiracy theory that has dominated our political and media discourse, which is that Donald Trump conspired with Russia over the 2016 election and that he’s an agent of the Russian government along with many of his associates," he continued.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/439989-greenwald-says-medi...
He's been very outspoken that he thinks the Russian interference is bs. His angle seems to be the Democrats aren't liberal enough.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwal...
"Volume I of the report concludes that the investigation did not find sufficient evidence that the campaign "coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities"
Seems pretty cut and dry.
Investigators ultimately had an incomplete picture of what happened due to communications that were encrypted, deleted or unsaved, as well as testimony that was false, incomplete or declined. However, the report stated that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion", but was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts. It also identifies links between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government, about which several persons connected to the campaign made false statements and obstructed investigations. Mueller later stated that his investigation's conclusion on Russian interference "deserves the attention of every American".
Phrases like:
- in sweeping and systematic fashion
- was welcomed by the Trump campaign
- links between
- ties to
- connected to
Granted, communicating the complexities of reality is very difficult, but I sincerely do not believe that a serious effort has been made in this case (or is in other cases, in general) to as accurately and clearly as possible communicate(!) that which is "known" (including the degree of certainty), versus that which is suspected, etc.
Psychologists and neurologists have very little understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which people form beliefs, but they do know that it is extremely complex, and can easily be demonstrated to be highly prone to error or manipulation.
Considering this, in a serious political system (as seems to be the common claim of what we have in Western democratic nations), I would expect more bi-partisan (among politicians and citizens) acknowledgement of these shortcomings, and support for a process of continuous improvement in the manner in which the public is informed of affairs. But instead, I rarely see this idea discussed, and it seems to me the aggregate manner in which reality is being described to us is becoming more chaotic/uncertain/indecipherable, not less.
My intuition tells me this is not accidental, but of course there is no way of knowing if that is true or not. But, I think it would be beneficial for the public to become more aware of this phenomenon, and start drawing attention to this attribute of public discussions on a regular basis - in doing so, perhaps the quality of discourse could be improved.
A nuanced report that concluded the existence of foreign interference, of campaign links to that foreign interference, and also of not significant enough evidence to conclude coordination between the two groups is going to include a lot of nuance in the phrasing of its conclusion.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_interferen...
I suspect we differ on what my intuition is. If I'm not mistaken, you seem to believe this style of language is because of the nuanced nature of the issue, whereas my intuition is that the style of language is chosen to ~muddy the waters and sow confusion. We're each entitled to our respective opinions, but neither of us knows what the reality is.
Various issues in this drama are "known", with varying degrees of certainty. Something important to keep in mind though, is that degree of certainty on complex, subjective (indeterminate) matters often varies significantly per person. Reality is often a lot messier than people like to acknowledge.
My point is roughly: there is a tremendous range of public opinion on this matter (and many others), with each individual likely being extremely confident that their belief is the correct one. It also seems fairly reasonable that hardly anyone on either side has actually read the report in question.
This seems like an undesirable state of affairs in a democratic nation. It seems to me that, at the very least, it would be possible and beneficial for an alternative, non-narrative based, summary of "just the discrete facts" (with accompanying certainty declarations, etc) document to be produced that would facilitate greater effective transparency, as well as improve the public's ability form beliefs that are more consistent with reality (and presumably in turn, decrease the variance/polarization in beliefs).
Although, based on my observations of social media discussions and voting patterns, I not only see little support for this sort of idea, but instead rather strong opposition to it. It seems like most people, on either side of the divide, desire certain things to be true, as opposed to desiring to know the truth of what has actually happened. If my intuition is correct, this seems like a harmful mindset for voters in a democracy to hold, not to mention the second order harm in areas such as general public harmony, and willingness to cooperate on other important initiatives such as climate change.
That doesn't mean there wasn't evidence to be found. Bear in mind that there was obstruction to the investigation.
How can anyone ever clear their name with a mentality like this? They investigated and didn't find sufficient evidence. Saying, "yeah, but there could be evidence" means nothing will convince you.
I was trying to be polite because this is getting political. I could counter your question with one of my own:
How can you convict someone when his supporters won't believe any evidence they don't like?
There was active obstruction into the investigation. From the Mueller investigation itself.
“Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
It’s the only story I’ve ever experienced first hand that seems to represent an actual instance of mass hysteria.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases
Persuasive discussion with people on the “other side” on this topic appears to be absolutely impossible.
Ive just given up on Americans who believe this Russian collusion narrative. It’s like talking to people in a cult or who are insane.
I know liberals exist who don’t fall prey to this thinking- but they’re not well represented in mainstream and social media universe.
It is such a sad development.
Really? It's my understanding that the Russians were sowing controversy for all parties and all kinds of people. Intelligence officers have testified that this was the case during the impeachment hearings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want more explanation, I posted elsewhere in the thread about a similar case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22110856
The election where 200M people vote will be a record. By a large large margin. I think the highest turnout has been 120M.
American news media firms are always prepared to blame others for their own actions.
It was clear this was going to be a problem after the 2000 Presidential election came down to a few semi-literate Floridians. One definition of "chaos" is a system involving large numbers with sensitive dependence on very small margins, and that's what we have here.
Edit: Well, I guess we're still hearing from the semi-literate Floridians. What are the high schools teaching kids about that election, anyway?
First, a big reason you didn't mention is that Nader running as a third party syphoned votes primarily from Gore.
Second, the butterfly ballots are a bad design. If you were to design a software interface in the same way and with the same failure modes as a butterfly ballot then you can't blame the user for not understanding it. Those ballots were not designed with usabilty in mind - calling people who failed to use them properly 'illiterate' is placing the blame in the wrong place.
Third, a plausable implication from your above comment is that you believe that people who didn't vote for the candidate you prefer are somehow less intelligent than you. I'm not saying that was your intent, but I can see how somebody might draw that conclusion from your comment.
Technically, it's incredibly easy to "say" whether any one factor had nothing to do with the outcome - in fact, this seems to be the overwhelmingly normal behavior of individuals, the media, and government officials.
What's impossible is to know whether any one factor had nothing to do with the outcome. More interestingly, it also seems nigh impossible for people on either side of the dispute to simply acknowledge that great certainty exists everywhere within the complexity of life, that we simply do not know what has taken place in this situation, or in the thousands of others that people argue about, with many of these arguments having a lifespan of decades if not longer.
It may seem like a trite idea, but I believe that if we could have more widespread realization and acceptance of this fundamental truth, perhaps we could move beyond this increasingly deep rut of partisan bickering we seem to find ourselves in.