Home grown dezinformatsiya/дезинформация

“Russian internet trolls worked overtime in 2016 to inject disinformation into American elections. A year later, as news reports now reveal, Democratic operatives, some funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, tried out these same tactics to boost Senator Doug Jones in Alabama. Russia’s online dezinformatsiya has gone native, and it will get worse.”  Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12, 2019

Disinformation, fake news, false narratives, conspiracy theories,  obfuscation, propaganda, yellow journalism, and flat out lies have always been a part of the American political process.  Disinformation is more a government embedded plan, but how are we to know our own government doesn’t do the same.  It was the Clinton campaign in 2008 which launched the “Obama birth certificate” story, which then made numerous evolutions through the right wing.  Her campaign also funded the fake dossier about Trump in Russia. None was done without the help of the deep state.

Not sure why WSJ is giving all the credit for our own home grown mischief and tactics to the Russians or even social media and the internet.  After all, we’ve got George Soros and all his many sticky fingers into U.S. non-profits and churches.

 

“The Kremlin’s “dezinformatsiya” campaign—whether carried out against Ukraine, Estonia, Germany or the U.S.—involves “a bewildering array of narratives designed to distort truth and confuse its enemies,” Mr. Patrikarakos writes. And of course it isn’t just the Kremlin that operates in such a way. “Obfuscation has found its perfect platforms” in the realm of social media, he notes, reaching “audiences to a degree unprecedented in modern history.” The conditions are ripe: “In the postmodern Western world, where academics decry the notion of an ‘objective truth,’ where the lack of trust in institutions is lower than at any other time in living memory, this type of information finds a receptive audience.”” (War in 140 Characters)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/26/before-fake-news-there-was-soviet-disinformation/?

 

(WND books, 2013)

Go to the Amazon site and “look inside” for an overview of this book.

Nothing ruins a relationship like politics

On Facebook, Christopher Buckley writes:

“It has long been my dour and sour view that you don't get to make good friends later in life because they don't have the same background or share the same experiences as the ones you've had with old friends... Well, my best friends died. (From living large. We should all be so lucky.)

Other friends, shockingly, have unfriended me because I believe in reason and they, passionately, in unthinking madness.

But I will tell you now that I was very wrong about what the length of a friendship means.

I am very glad to know everyone I have met here on this platform along the way and on my life's journey...

We expire... That's the deal.

So fill your barrels as you sail on... Life is a continuum... (funny if you know me IRL) and we will be cruising these waters until the end! XOXO

Social networking—the impact

This could be a little dated considering the speed of change on the internet.  It was published in January 2014, but updated in September 2014. About 50% of people over 65 use a social networking site—and at the time of the survey, the preference was Facebook. Pew Internet Project

“Do social networking sites isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? In November 2010, we examined SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, community, and political engagement, and found:

• Social networking sites are increasingly used to keep up with close social ties
• The average user of a social networking site has more close ties and is half as likely to be socially isolated as the average American
• Facebook users are more trusting than others
• Facebook users have more close relationships
• Internet users get more support from their social ties and Facebook users get the most support
• Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people
• Facebook revives “dormant” relationships
• MySpace users are more likely to be open to opposing points of view

According to a survey, the top 10 Astroturfers

TOP 10 ASTROTURFERS by Sharyl Attkisson

Astroturfers often disguise themselves and publish blogs, write letters to the editor, produce ads, start non-profits, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts, edit Wikipedia pages or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. They use their partners in blogs and in the news media in an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy or impartiality to their efforts. They call truth a myth, then “de-bunk it;’ they build straw men then chop them down; and I think they make about 20% of their stories about LBGT, even though that’s 2% of the population. (My opinion, not Sharyl’s.)

1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown

2. Media Matters for America

3. University of California Hastings Professor Dorit Rubenstein Reiss and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit

4. “Science” Blogs such as: Skeptic.com, Skepchick.org, Scienceblogs.com (Respectful Insolence), Popsci.com and SkepticalRaptors.com

5. Mother Jones

6. Salon.com and Vox.com

7. White House press briefings and press secretary Josh Earnest [I’d add Marie Harf]

8. Daily Kos and The Huffington Post

9. CNN, NBC, New York Times, Politico and Talking Points Memo (TPM)

10. MSNBC, Slate.com, Los Angeles Times and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Jon Stewart.

http://sharylattkisson.com/top-10-astroturfers/

You can be sure my blog has no sponsors, no ads, it’s 100% Norma’s research, opinion, and experience. When I’m wrong and when I’m right, I’m standing on real grass, not Astroturf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU

This sounds really scary!

Using a person's social network information instead of a resume? Based on the remarks, jokes, and opinions I've seen on blogs, Twitter and Facebook, some people ought to be more cautious about building a different profile! And that list of friends? And family? The future employer just might decide the person is too social, or not social enough and not even know she might be in a book club, or volunteer at a hospital, or belong to a bowling league, and therefore doesn't socialize on-line.

Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates' suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether.

A résumé doesn't provide much depth about a candidate, says Christina Cacioppo, an associate at Union Square Ventures who blogs about the hiring process on the company's website and was herself hired after she compiled a profile comprising her personal blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, and links to social-media sites Delicious and Dopplr, which showed places where she had traveled.

The world of technology is just getting too strange and scary. I just learned today that even if your cell phone is "off" you are being tracked. Also, if you have any sensitive financial or political data, do not keep it on a computer that is hooked to the internet.

Insofar as tracking phones, if you believe yourself or the person you are with is a target worth tracking, and that the opponent has the ability, best is to not carry any phone. Smartphone or not. The phone is constantly tracked by the company. Your travel habits can be mapped retroactively or in realtime. Think of the cell phone as a strobe light that's always blinking. We can't see them blinking, but the phone company can.

Insofar as smartphones, iPhones for instance have a battery that cannot be removed. With a BlackBerry you can pop off the back and take out the battery. When I was with certain units on the Iraq/Iran border, everyone with a phone was to take out the battery. An officer said that if you leave the battery in, you can practically watch it drain as the Iranians ping the phone. If they see thirty phones travelling together in a remote area on their border, they likely would take notice. But imagine ten people have phones. If one guy doesn't take out the battery, that's enough to track the unit and even hit you across the border with rockets, artillery or an airstrike. Michael Yon, Iraq war reporter

Google and social networks

What would we do without twins?

The media were all abuzz this week with the revelation from a pre-print e-article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS 2009 : 0806746106v1-pnas.0806746106) that analyzed 1,110 adolescent twins from 142 schools and discovered "your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves." This apparently explains why on Facebook some people have hundreds of "friends," many of whom count each other as friends, and other people only have a few. But you wait, no one really cares why you have 120 cyberfriends, and I have three. Eventually they'll find a way to tie this into 1) poverty, and 2) global climate control. I read a lot of medical articles, and this is where they go--follow the (grant) money. Already one of the researchers is planning for this direction--otherwise, where would his funding come from?

"Given that social networks play important roles in determining a wide variety of things ranging from employment and wages to the spread of disease, it is important to understand why networks exhibit the patterns that they do," Matthew Jackson, a Stanford University economist, wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.

All quotes are from the WSJ summary, because I didn't want to wade through the original. Similar reports appeared in Boston Globe, Columbus Dispatch, etc. Whether the writers actually read the pre-print, I don't know.

When I read the article I immediately thought of my friend Von. I hadn't thought of her in many years as she died about 20 years ago. She had the most amazing circle of friends--it was vast. I think we met at a neighborhood Bible study--and there was just something about her--the voice, the smile, her flashing black eyes, her attention to you that made you think you were the only person in the crowded room. At first I was a little puffed up to be one of Von's friends--basking in the reflection of her popularity. Then I discovered that if I wanted any quality time with her and we pulled out our pocket calenders, she had no time free for months! I'm a "can we meet tomorrow for coffee" type of woman, and if my friend has to schedule me in for November when we run into each other at the supermarket in July, I start to scan the horizon for someone with fewer friends. But she really was a fabulous woman. When we saw each other one autumn at a community event, I noticed she was gaining weight, but only through the middle. I didn't say anything, but within a few months I learned through mutual friends she had a massive tumor. And it was malignant. Her friend network didn't fail her. Most of us knew each other. There were management friends and line friends--she had many people to sit with her in the hospital and hold her head when she vomited; many to bring meals into her large family; many to call and send notes. Many to call each other and consult and grieve together. Eventually, her deteriorating health caused her to be selective because she needed to save her energy resources just to stay alive and hold her husband and children close.

This morning I saw something out of place on top of a bookshelf--a retail bookmark I'd never seen. My office may be messy, but the living room is rarely a place for clutter. I picked it up--the illustration was either a sunset or sunrise over an ocean. I turned it over, and there was a note from Von to my husband, written in 1977 for his *Cursillo week-end, November 10-13, 1977, Men's 52nd, Columbus. So Von's friendship is still here to bring a smile and thank-you.

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*A three-day experience of Christian renewal which originated in the Roman Catholic Church. The Cursillo program has been duplicated in some Protestant denominations, Walk to Emmaus, Vía De Cristo, Tres Días, with changes made to reflect the doctrines and culture of different denominations. In Columbus it is now called Cum Cristo, and is mixed Catholic and Protestant event.