terryd

> ...the group's¹ objective wasn't to deceive voters...

"The report does not say whether the project purchased the Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly began to follow Mr. Moore. But it takes credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” and points to stories on the phenomenon in the mainstream media. “Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers,” reported The New York Post."

Deception.

> Which seems to have involved at least one New Knowledge member but it seems wasn't actually run by New Knowledge.

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire funding AET wrote an apology. What does he have to apologize for? Well he paid AET $750k, AET paid New Knowledge at least $100k of that to run this disinformation campaign. So you can knock it off with the "at least one member... seems wasn't run by New Knowledge..." Obviously my patience has run thin on this - it has been proven that Morgan is a liar and that New Knowledge was deeply involved.

https://medium.com/@reidhoffman/truth-and-politics-1a532bc6c...

As I said, they've change their story more than once. When Morgan was pressed on the leaked internal report's clearly political goals, he said that "it didn't ring a bell".

Oh, and go check out their release of the report they provided the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in December. What, you didn't know that this politically motivated organization with an agenda was asked to inform the Senate about Russian interference in US election? Yeah, they were - and did, in December. Checkout the timestamp on that pdf - not December... weird...

> That said, I find it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you're drawing parallels between a limited spread of misinformation centered around a single event with literally murdering people.

When you say "limited spread" do you actually mean "completely unrestrained"? And no. I find it hard to believe that you don't see the parallels between the justifications for unethical experimentation conducted on an unwitting population during the cold war, and the rationalization you've provided in this thread. It has nothing to do with deaths, it has everything to do with the ethics and the non-zero cost to individuals. In the cold war a statistically insignificant portion of the population involuntarily paid a heavy price, in this "experiment" (it wasn't, the leak shows it was a political action) a statistically insignificant portion of the population was convinced that their president was a traitorous Russian agent and driven mad with impotent rage.

First of all, the story has actually changed a couple of times. So if you really want to understand the timeline - you are going to need to refer to archives of those articles. Second, the "small experiment" had a budget of at least $100k that they are willing to admit to - traceable money that flowed through people related to the USDS and DoJ. You know that Obama repealed the ban on domestic propaganda before he left office, right? I couldn't tell you the number of times a counter-intel op leaked into domestic media (PopSci was really bad about it) - and months of work would instantly go up in smoke as the operation got scuttled, it makes me sick thinking that is no longer the case. New Knowledge's objective was to deceive voters. That is damage that can't be undone, they even tricked the media (a disappointingly easy task) into spreading the lie.

If you can't see something very wrong with this, well you'll be just fine in cold-war 2.0 - we can pick up where we left off in government experimentation on an unwitting public. MKULTRA 2 electricboogaloo. I'm sure its been a while since we updated our nuclear/biological/chemical weapons models... so long as it doesn't affect the public by a statistically significant amount - we should be fine to resume the 1970s practice of releasing airborne pathogens over major American population centers, doubling the number of deaths in the elderly.

Renee DiResta: Mozilla Fellow, Director of Research at New Knowledge

https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410

New Knowledge is the organization that setup a fake Russian botnet, and then tried to push a narrative about how the Republican candidate in an Alabama Senate race was being assisted by this "Russian election interference"... anybody involved with that organization is a scumbag - it has zero redeeming qualities. Renee has been making the rounds lately on Youtube, informing everyone about how much of a threat these operations are (not her organizations fabricated ops, the totally real ones). I haven't yet found the prime mover in this, but her activities are well aligned with those of the DoD ratcheting up the scaremongering about the (according to them) active Chinese operations against the US population. So there is a pretty strong push for further internet lockdown measures being made right now by these people - and Mozilla is associated. At this point I would not be at all surprised to hear Mozilla announce RealID browser integration.

Even after you have fallen victim to the very thing you are arguing isn't a problem - you still don't see it as a problem? It is a very big problem that these articles are being destructively modified. They are whipping up people that are already so freaked out that they think the President is both Hitler and a Russian agent, and people like you are left wondering what the big deal is when you look at the results of stealth edits.

   -- a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again”
   ++ a young man wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat

   -- More video shows Phillips wiping away tears in reaction to the harassment.
   ++ More video shows Phillips wiping away tears after the incident.

You can be sure that a huge number of tweets and facebook posts, by politicians and journalists/pundits promoting the story, frequently found in the sidebar of articles like this - got memory holed as well.

> I find the bias, when it exists, is in the presentation, not the facts themselves.

You mean something like a lie by omission? That is pretty easily solved with some form of source control and public pull requests. An equivalent to git blame would be pretty helpful (cue Sinclair Broadcast Group NPC script reading). Just watch http://newsdiffs.org/ for a while, these people regularly modify stories without editor's notes. It is kind of funny that further below you discuss the embarrassing conduct of the media in their coverage of Covington Catholic... do you remember what was in the news cycle right before they breathlessly pounced on a non-story? The media was getting embarrassed by a very rare direct denial from the DoJ in relation to their latest reporting on the Trump collusion conspiracy theory.

I agree with your broader point though: this won't improve the media. They're not even pretending to be unbiased and have no shame in telling laughably obvious lies about the most ridiculous thing - like koi ponds. Their motivation is clear: short sighted servicing of those needing confirmation bias conforming stories. This isn't a scheme hatched in a smoke filled back room, it is just a very foolish business plan.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/358983-media-shows-w...

> Others, like a cycle of revenge attacks, are not, at least not yet.

This is why censorship is so dangerous. I immediately thought of 3 attacks following NZ that could be interpreted as reprisals. I was completely unsurprised to see that no further details have been released in the week between then and now. We only know that the perpetrators were migrants from troubled parts of the world, and were already known to authorities - having developed criminal records since their arrival. A priest was stabbed in Canada, 3 people were killed in the Netherlands (3 more wounded), a bus in Italy with 52 children onboard was set ablaze. The spokesman for ISIS called for attacks after several months of radio silence, Erdoğan has been stirring his people up (which has historically resulted in violence).

Were you unaware of these events, or do you consider them normal? If you were unaware of them, do you think that is a result of selective reporting? I can tell you that absolutely no in depth reporting has occurred - no effort beyond that of news wire copy-paste.