First, it seeks to further divide and polarize the United States along ideological lines. As long as we are fighting among ourselves, we aren’t paying attention to what [the opponents are doing elsewhere.] Second, it attempts to undermine our trust in the institutions that sustain a strong nation and a strong democracy. The media, science, academia and the electoral process are all regular targets of troll venom. The [opponents] want to push us further apart while causing us to lose trust in what has traditionally made us strong.

…[They] understand the way information is spread on the platforms they use and, more important, they understand how to reach their American audience. On the theory that it is easier to catch a fly with honey, many troll messages are not negative. Instead, they are cute, or educational, or uplifting, all in an attempt to gain credibility and followers.

*****

…Before Twitter suspended PoliteMelanie’s account, [one] tweet had more than 125,000 retweets and likes — and this wasn’t even her most popular post. Another tweet from this account became the topic of a heartwarming Scary Mommy blog post. A third PoliteMelanie tweet was highlighted by the popular humor website CollegeHumor.com. PoliteMelanie garnered nearly 25,000 followers in less than six months — [they had] effectively built a brand.

…Tweets from other accounts that were part of the PoliteMelanie network had similar success: We found them cited by The Washington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed, Al Jazeera, the New York Post and Essence magazine, to name a few. One of these accounts, @Blk_Hermione, had a tweet with cross-platform success, gaining more than 40,000 “upvotes” to make the front page of Reddit. An analysis of 2 million English-language IRA tweets released by Twitter last July shows that the trolls had at that point gained 30 million likes and 22 million retweets among 1,866 English-language accounts active between 2014 and 2017.

*****

…They are remarkably astute in exploiting questions of culture and identity and are frequently among the first to push new divisive conversations. We’ve seen debates that they helped foment move quickly from Twitter to mainstream print media. On topics ranging from vaccines to Colin Kaepernick, they can speak vehemently to the extremes of both sides. In so doing, they work to drive Americans ideologically further apart.

…This tweet gained almost half a million likes and retweets, though even this seemingly positive message could still be read as a dig at other first ladies. The trolls know that a message is in the eye of the beholder.

Russian trolls have mastered the viral tweet – The Washington Post

Don’t feed the trolls, folks.

There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. ‘Wait,’ I caught myself wondering more than once, ‘is that what happened today?’

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: …‘The coup has started …’ ” (Swipe.) “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” (Swipe.) “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” (Swipe.) “Only one man can stop this chaos …” (Swipe, swipe, swipe.)

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

****

…Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. …Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

…Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). …Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

…Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

…Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

…Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

…From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory.

…When a ProPublica reporter confronted [Parscale] about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

****

…[P] created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. …P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power.

…They may use gentler terminology—’muddy the waters’ [or] ‘alternative facts’—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

…The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

…If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

…“With the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking.

…In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

****

…Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

…The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

…Voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal.

*****

…The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. …According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose.

…They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

…When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better.

…This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

…“It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media.”

The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation – The Atlantic

n/t

Judy Mikovits co-wrote a 2009 research paper that linked the mysterious condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome to a retrovirus that came from mice.

…Less than two years later, those hopes were dashed when follow-up studies failed to replicate the findings and the respected journal “Science” retracted the paper. Researchers posited that the study’s inaccurate conclusions were the result of contamination of the lab samples, and the theory that a virus might be the source of the still-mysterious condition died.

…In the years after the 2009 study was retracted, Mikovits was fired from her job leading a research institute. 

…Then, her employers filed criminal and civil charges against her for allegedly stealing research materials and data when she left her job.

…She suggests that she was not accused of a crime and that the arrest was intended to intimidate her.

But the local prosecutor in Washoe County, Nev., charged her with allegedly stealing computer data and other materials from her former lab at the Whittemore Peterson Institute.

…Meanwhile, she doubled down on debunked theories linking retroviruses that originated in mice to medical conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome and autism.

…Mikovits wrote her first book with anti-vaccine advocate Kent Heckenlively in 2014, called “Plague.” Their second book, “Plague of Corruption,” was published by Skyhorse Publishing this year.

…In a film called “Plandemic,” and in a recently published book that topped the Amazon bestsellers chart this week, she makes a bizarre and false claim: that the doctors and experts shaping public policy in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic have silenced dissenting voices and misled the public for sinister reasons.

She falsely claims that wealthy people intentionally spread the virus to increase vaccination rates and that wearing face masks is harmful.

…She acknowledged her past legal troubles — including the arrest — in the film, but suggested her woes stem from an alleged conspiracy to crush her once-promising career and destroy her credibility as a scientist.

Mikovits also flung false and wild allegations at several high-profile scientists in “Plandemic,” including Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force. In the weeks before the “Plandemic” trailer launched, she had been positioning herself as an expert and an anti-Fauci voice in interviews with conspiracy-hawking and far right-leaning websites like the Epoch Times and the Gateway Pundit.

University of Colorado at Denver professor Jennifer Reich, who studies the anti-vaccine movement, explained why so many people are willing to believe the unsupported claims Mikovits has made about the coronavirus pandemic.

“The claims Mikovits makes highlight uncertainties people feel right now,” Reich told The Post in an email.

People who do not have “firsthand knowledge” of a pandemic victim may question the statistics officials have been reporting on infection and death rates, Reich said.

Who is Judy Mikovits, star of the viral coronavirus conspiracy film “Plandemic,” banned by Facebook and others as harmful and misleading – The Washington Post

hmmm