Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower reveals that Stephen Bannon was testing phrases like "drain the swamp" and pushing a pro-Putin narrative years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Chris Wylie

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday. 

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year. 

Among the messages tested were “drain the swamp” and “deep state,” he said.

According to Wylie, Bannon was the big boss and everything had to go through him.

And get this: 

The data and analyses that Cambridge Analytica generated in this time provided discoveries that would later form the emotionally charged core of Trump’s presidential platform, said Wylie, whose disclosures in news reports over the past several days have rocked both his onetime employer and Facebook. 

“Trump wasn’t in our consciousness at that moment; this was well before he became a thing,” Wylie said. “He wasn’t a client or anything.” 

The year before Trump announced his presidential bid, the data firm already had found a high level of alienation among young, white Americans with a conservative bent. 

In focus groups arranged to test messages for the 2014 midterms, these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intended to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s entrenched political community and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called “race realism,” he recounted.

Besides the Trump catchphrases that Bannon was testing out in 2014, there was also this startling revelation: 

“The only foreign thing we tested was Putin,” he said. “It turns out, there’s a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin’s invasion of Crimea.”

Now look I am really fighting the urge to put on my conspiracy theory tinfoil hat here, but there is no way to categorize this as a string of coincidences. 

It really sounds like there was an anti-immigrant, racist, pro-Putin platform all ready to go and all they needed was a figurehead to be the face of the campaign.

Cue Donald J. Trump.

Or, and this is only a little less conspiratorial, since Bannon met Trump way back in 2010, perhaps all of this was tested with him in mind, and he has literally been planning his campaign since at least 2014 or 2013.

Whatever the truth behind this is, what cannot be refuted is that people essentially voted for a Steven Bannon in Trump clothing.

GQ Magazine lists the Bible among the "21 Books You Don't Have to Read."

Courtesy of GQ: 

The Holy Bible is rated very highly by all the people who supposedly live by it but who in actuality have not read it. Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced. It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned. 

Indeed. I agree wholeheartedly.

As you can imagine that has some Christian leaders all worked up.

Including, of course, Franklin Graham.

Okay somebody needs to tell these idiots that just because somebody BUYS the Bible that does not mean they have READ the Bible.

It is actually rare for anybody to sit down and read the entire book from cover to cover.

I actually HAVE read the Bible, which separates me from the vast majority of people who self identify as Christians.

I was in my teens when I read it the first time, and found it laborious and poorly written.

I quite literally could not imagine how such a piss poor book could have inspired an entire religion.

I attempted to read it again in my twenties, but then one day suddenly stopped with the realization that doing so was a complete waste of my time.

And I stand by that assessment.

White Supremacist kicked off Facebook. Well occasionally Facebook gets something right.

Courtesy of Fast Forward:

Facebook is the latest platform to expel white supremacist Richard Spencer. The website has removed three pages that belonged to the white supremacist, the BBC reported. 

Spencer, who is known for popularizing the term “alt-right,” ran the Facebook page of his National Policy Institute think tank, another one promoting his AltRight.com news analysis website, and his personal page. 

At a time when Facebook is under scrutiny for privacy concerns, the social media website is taking action against hate speech. 

Spencer rose to prominence in 2016 when he was filmed celebrating President Trump’s election win by cheering: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory,” to an audience who responded with Nazi-like salutes. 

I am all for free speech and all.

But there are some people whose free speech is all about taking freedoms away from other people, and I am less than sympathetic when those individuals lost their rights.

Sarah Palin's pals Diamond and Silk get kicked off Facebook after their videos are deemed "unsafe for the community."

.@DiamondandSilk: "If a privately owned bakery has to go against their Christian values to bake a cake, then Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to suck it up buttercup and allow Diamond and Silk to speak our truth." pic.twitter.com/LnukaSjwD4

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2018

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Diamond and Silk,” the two North Carolina sisters who have profitably promoted themselves as Donald Trump’s biggest fans, took to Fox & Friends and Twitter this weekend in a panic after Facebook determined their content –primarily videos — is “unsafe to the community,” causing their traffic to collapse while hitting them in the pocketbooks. 

The two, dubbed by MSNBC host Joy Reid as “Cubic Zirconia and Rayon,” (real names Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson), have become recognizable regulars on Fox News where they are notable for siting side-by-side and opining on the political topic du jour. 

However things have taken a turn for the worse in the past six months as Facebook informed the two that their videos are unacceptable on the social media site.

Not typically a fan of censorship, but I cannot say I am going to shed a tear over this.

 These two women are TERRIBLE!

I mean look who they hang out with.

Clearly Facebook is dead serious about cleaning up their platform.

I for one am going to pay closer attention to what I post on the Immoral Minority Facebook page.

Not looking to give anybody an excuse. 

Facebook reveals that as many as 87 million people may have had their data stolen by Cambridge Analytica.

Seriously, what in the hell would make you trust me?

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

Facebook on Wednesday said that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election — a figure far higher than the estimate of 50 million that had been widely cited since the leak was reported last month.

Facebook had not previously disclosed how many accounts had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, the firm connected to the Trump campaign. It has also been reluctant to disclose how it was used by Russian-backed actors to influence the 2016 presidential election. 

Among Facebook’s acknowledgments on Wednesday was the disclosure of a vulnerability in its search and account recovery functions that it said could have exposed “most” of its 2 billion users to having their public profile information harvested.

So to be clear this 87 million number STILL may not prove accurate, as essentially every Facebook user's information could have been "harvested," which sounds like a fancy word for "stolen."

So now Zuckerberg is claiming that Facebook will now provide the tools for users to better control who accesses their information, but keep in mind that they have known about this for years and only started to give a shit when journalists reported on the multiple breaches.

At least least Tom Anderson of MySpace pretended to be our friend.

Facebook stocks plunge as the FTC launches investigation into data sharing practices. Update!

Courtesy of NBC News: 

Shares of Facebook cratered as much as 6 percent Monday after the Federal Trade Commission announced it is investigating the company's data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica leak of 50 million users' information. 

"The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices," the agency said in a statement. 

The FTC declined to confirm last week that it was investigating Facebook, including whether it violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011. 

The decree required that Facebook notify users and receive explicit permission before sharing personal data beyond their specified privacy settings. 

A violation of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation.

Well we all know that they certainly violated that consent decree, and at $40,000 a pop that might well bankrupt Facebook.

But before you feel too bad for this multi billion dollar company, perhaps you ought to read this article from a guy who found out that Facebook had collected every phone number in his contact list:

This is not the most startling example of Facebook's data collection. At least one user has reported that all of his text messages from an Android phone have somehow ended up being stored by Mark Zuckerberg's company. 

Even if Facebook users agree to share this data, their friends whose numbers or text messages are being collected almost certainly have not. And even if those people have never joined Facebook - or have decided to delete their accounts - it looks as though some of their data will stay with the social network as long as the people who provided it remain.

And if you are now wondering how that kind of data could be misused, well this next article gives a pretty good example.

Courtesy of Fortune: 

Cambridge Analytica isn’t the only entity using Facebook data for its own ends. 

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied on Facebook data to find and track immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, according to a new report by The Intercept. 

The report tells of one instance in which ICE used backend Facebook data to determine when the account of the person in question was accessed, as well as the IP addresses corresponding to each login. The agents reportedly combined this data with other routinely used records, such as phone records, to pinpoint his location.

This is all perfectly legal, and of course most of us are probably okay with law enforcement using these techniques to catch the bad guys, but under the Trump Administration the label "bad guys" could now pertain to people who just a year ago were considered upstanding members of the community.

Update: Zuckerberg has now agreed to testify before Congress.

I hope they hold his damn feet to the fire.

A Facebook post by a comic book store owner reminds us that these parkland kids may be brave on the outside, but on the inside they are shattered and barely holding it together.

Facebook post by a comic shop owner who met some of the Parkland students recently. Very hard to read but I’m glad I did. pic.twitter.com/Cuq8rvs6Ea

— Tres @ C2E2 AA #T14 (@tresdcomics) March 24, 2018

We keep expecting these kids to save the country, but who is making sure that they will be saved as well?

They have gone from one terrifying reality involving gun violence, to another terrifying reality involving being thrust onto the national stage.

At some point they need the time to heal.

Hopefully that time will come before the wounds become too deep, and the wounds become too forever.

Sarah Palin with the only two black women in America that can stand her.

This is what the two women wrote on their original post:

Had a wonderful time at Mar-a-Lago with the fabulous Governor Sarah Palin along with her beautiful daughter Ms. Piper. She did a magnificent job as the keynote speaker at The Republican Party of Palm Beach County Lincoln Day Dinner. Such a phenomenal woman. 

Actually this Diamond and Silk duo has appeared on Fox News, and other Right Wing outlets, bad mouthing the BLM movement, speaking out against Barack Obama, and spouting conservative talking points which the racists eat up with a spoon.

So of course they love them some Sarah Palin.

Oh well, there is no accounting for taste.

Or integrity.

Or common sense.

Data analysis group associated with Trump campaign harvested information from millions of Facebook accounts in order to target them more effectively.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. 

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. 

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” 

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. 

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Couple of things to note here.

First off Jared Kushner took credit for bringing Cambridge Analytica into the Trump campaign:  

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Secondly if this breach happened way back in 2014, it might indicate that Trump was already getting his ducks in a row to run way back then, despite his claims that he did not decide until 2015. 

Thirdly using Facebook data was also how the Russians targeted users for their propaganda campaign, which could link their efforts directly to Kushner and the Trump campaign, something I am certain Robert Mueller is already looking into.

Have you noticed that the more we learn, the more it seems to indicate that the Russians and the Trump campaign worked hand in hand to win that 2016 election?

P.S. The Massachusetts Attorney General is now launching in investigation into Cambridge Analytica. 

So did the Russian hackers get hacked? Maybe.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

The Kremlin-backed troll farm at the center of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has quietly suffered a catastrophic security breach, The Daily Beast has confirmed, in a leak that spilled new details of its operations onto obscure corners of the internet. 

The Russian “information exchange” Joker.Buzz, which auctions off often stolen or confidential information, advertised a leak for a large cache of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) internal documents. It includes names of Americans, activists in particular, whom the organization specifically targeted; American-based proxies used to access Reddit and the viral meme site 9Gag; and login information for troll farm accounts. 

Even the advertisement for the document dump provides a trove of previously unknown information about the breadth of Russia’s disinformation effort in the United States, including rallies pushed by IRA social media accounts that turned violent.

What the Daily Beast was able to confirm:  

While the date of the auction could not be independently confirmed, the authenticity of the leak can. The leaked documents list screen names connected to a number of American citizens who were used as unwitting proxies by the Russians. The Daily Beast was able to track down four of those citizens, whose names have not been previously revealed. The leak contains precise dates in 2016 in which the IRA-created account Blacktivist reached out to those U.S. citizens, plus a short description of the conversations. The Daily Beast spoke to those citizens, and confirmed they interacted with the Blacktivist account in the ways described by the IRA in the document. In one case, the American even provided screenshots of his interactions with the Russian troll trying to dupe him. 

In short, the leaked document contains details of the Russian disinformation campaign that have not been previously made public—details which The Daily Beast was able to confirm. 

The leak shows that even as the Russian trolls were able to influence and manipulate American political discourse online, they were less equipped to keep their own secrets. While The Daily Beast does not possess anything close to a comprehensive trove of the IRA’s internal operations, it is now likely that substantial amounts of the troll farm’s files are waiting to be discovered online.

This data treasure trove also reveals how the troll farm utilized social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and even Tumblr to spread their divisive propaganda and promote the Donald Trump campaign. 

It is also more proof that the investigations in Russian interference is not a "witch hunt" but rather a very important, and necessary step in protecting ourselves from future manipulation and interference.

How Facebook's advertising algorithm allowed the Trump campaign (And the Russians) reach far more people, for far less money.

Courtesy of Wired: 

Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount. 

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money. 

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.

The article goes on to explain that it was actually more costly for the Clinton campaign to target Facebook users in urban areas, where her demographics were better, than the Trump campaign's attempt to reach voters in rural areas.

To be fair many of these same tools were also available to the Clinton campaign, however you also need to keep in mind that Facebook sent folks to the Trump campaign to specifically teach them how to better use the platform.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Fleshed out, Parscale is the man behind the Trump campaign’s digital media efforts in 2016. He was hired to create a website for $1,500 (as he explained in that “60 Minutes” interview) and then his role expanded until he was managing tens of millions of dollars intended to promote the presidential candidate online. 

The point of the interview was, in part, to serve as a profile of Parscale but, more broadly, to explain the primary way in which those millions were spent. Per Parscale’s accounting, that was largely on Facebook advertising. Trump’s team advertised on other platforms, too, but “Facebook was the 500-pound gorilla, 80 percent of the budget kind of thing,” Parscale said. 

He also revealed that Facebook even sent staff — whose political persuasion had been cleared by the company — to aid in that effort, to help Parscale “know every, single secret button, click, technology [they] have,” as he said in the interview. The campaign poured money into Facebook, sending thousands of versions of tweaked ads to maximize response. Then it won the presidency by a margin narrow enough that Parscale (and Facebook) can justifiably take credit.

That's right Facebook worked hand in orange tinted hand to help the Trump campaign beat Hillary Clinton.

 And that is without even taking into consideration how they allowed the Russians to weaponize their site to attack Clinton voters and spread misinformation to Trump supporters.

So when they say that Facebook was a neutral participant, or that they are simply a social gathering place with no agenda, they are full of shit. 

The Florida school shooting survivor who confronted Marco Rubio about taking NRA money has been forced off of Facebook by death threats.

Temporarily got off Facebook because there’s no character count so the death threats from the @NRA cultists are a bit more graphic than those on twitter. Will be back when I have the time for it. Busy getting my feelings hurt by fellow teenagers at Br**tb*rt

— Cameron Kasky (@cameron_kasky) February 21, 2018

Courtesy of The Hill: 

A survivor of the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week says he has left Facebook after receiving death threats for his gun control advocacy. 

"Temporarily got off Facebook because there’s no character count so the death threats from the @NRA cultists are a bit more graphic than those on twitter," Cameron Kasky tweeted. "Will be back when I have the time for it. Busy getting my feelings hurt by fellow teenagers at Br**tb*rt." 

Kasky, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has become an outspoken leader of the nationwide student-led movement for gun restrictions in the wake of the shooting, where 17 of his classmates and faculty members were killed. 

The high schooler challenged Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R) during a CNN town hall discussion with lawmakers and fellow survivors on gun laws. 

“In the name of 17 people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?” Kasky asked Rubio.

To threaten the life of a child is shitty enough, but to threaten the life of a kid who just survived a school shooting where over a dozen of his peers were murdered is extra shitty.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

I think this young man and his schoolmates are inspiring, but I certainly understand why they scare the crap out of the NRA.

And they should be scared: 

The students who survived a mass shooting at their Florida high school last week have raised more than $3.5 million since the attack and say they plan to put the money toward a “long-term effort” to reform gun laws. 

More than 18,000 people have donated nearly $1.5 million to the “Never Again” campaign and the upcoming March For Our Lives, both of which were organized by survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., according to the Miami Herald. 

Those donations were followed by a $500,000 donation from George and Amala Clooney, who also plan to participate in the pro-gun control march in Washington, D.C., next month. 

The Clooneys’ donation was followed by matching donations from Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. 

A spokeswoman for March For Our Lives told the Herald that the $3.5 million raised will first be used to help fund the event in Washington and remaining funds will be put toward the “long-term” gun control effort.

I saw a tweet awhile back that simply said 'These kids will save all of us."

I thought that was a little much at the time, but perhaps that person had a point. 

One of the world's top advertisers is threatening to take their ads offline if digital platforms do not do something about the fake news and extremism on their sites.

Courtesy of CNN: 

Unilever is threatening to pull its advertising from digital platforms that it says have become a "swamp" of fake news, racism, sexism and extremism. 

The forceful warning to digital platforms such as Google (GOOGL) and Facebook (FB) will be delivered at an advertising conference in California later on Monday. 

"We cannot continue to prop up a digital supply chain ... which at times is little better than a swamp in terms of its transparency," Unilever marketing boss Keith Weed will say, according to a copy of his speech obtained by CNN. 

Unilever (UL), which owns brands including Dove, Lipton, and Ben & Jerry's, is one of the world's top advertisers. It has an annual marketing budget of roughly €8 billion ($9.8 billion), and 25% of its ads are digital. 

Weed will say that a proliferation of objectionable content on social media -- and a lack of protections for children -- is eroding social trust, harming users and undermining democracies.

This is the kind of thing that can actually have an impact.

As large and powerful as Google and Facebook are, their power is greatly reduced once you remove their revenue streams.

If enough advertisers follow Unilever's lead it could almost change things overnight. 

Devin Nunes has his own online propaganda platform paid for with campaign donations.

 Courtesy of CNN:

The campaign committee for House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes has been funding a website billed as a local news outlet. 

The site, CARepublican.com, features headlines ranging from national politics stories to state and local matters and college football. Many of the posts link out to conservative sites like National Review and The Federalist, and the Facebook page for the site labels it a media/news company that is focused on "delivering the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis." 

The site says it is paid for by Nunes' campaign committee, and the congressman has shared some CARepublican posts on his Facebook page. 

Campaign money? I'm surprised it is not simply funded by the Russians, since Nunes is clearly doing their dirty work for them.

Well if you were looking for some fake news, I think we have narrowed the search a little.

Though actually it might be too late.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

An online media outlet funded by Rep. Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) campaign appeared to be down Sunday afternoon after what the site called “heavy traffic and an attack on our servers.” 

“The California Republican,” the name of the site, posted on its Facebook page that those trying to reach the site may encounter an error message. 

As of late Sunday afternoon, the link to the site’s home page redirects back to the outlet’s Facebook page, and links to articles redirect to a broken Facebook link. 

Politico reported earlier Sunday that the Nunes campaign has paid nearly $8,000 to a Fresno-area communications consultant since July for the site. "The California Republican" is listed as a "Media/News Company" on Facebook.

Well that must be terribly inconvenient.

Now how will all the mouth breathers get their phony news and conspiracy theories?

Oh wait, I guess Fox News still exists doesn't it? 

Right Wingers and Trump supporters are overwhelmingly the largest consumers of fake news on the internet.

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

Fake news published in the U.S. was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by right-wing social media users, a new study from the University of Oxford has revealed. 

Research from Oxford's "computational propaganda project" investigated into the sources of "junk news" shared in the three months leading up to President Donald Trump's first State of the Union address last month. 

On Facebook, they found that "extreme hard-right" conservatives shared more fake news stories than all other political groups combined, while on Twitter, Trump supporters consumed the most fake news. 

"On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share," they said.

They should just simply say that liberals are smarter.

Because let's face it, we are.

That is not to say that progressives cannot chase after fake stories as well.

It simply means that as a rule once we discover that they are fake, we do not then make excuses to continue believing them.

Russian bots retweeted Donald Trump nearly half a million times during the final days of the 2016 election, while also setting up political events on Facebook to sow the seeds of divisiveness.

Courtesy of Newsweek:

Russian bots retweeted Donald Trump nearly half a million times in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, and more than 60,000 Americans RSVP’d for Facebook events created by Kremlin-linked trolls, the social media giants revealed in congressional documents this month. 

In written statements to two congressional panels investigating Russia’s election interference, the companies revealed new details about the extent of the Kremlin disinformation that reached more than 120 million Americans during the presidential race. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia launched an unprecedented series of cyber attacks and fake news floods to sow division and sway voters ahead of Trump’s surprise victory. 

Twitter revealed that Russian-linked bot accounts recirculated Trump’s tweets more than two million times between September 1 and November 15, 2016, with nearly 500,000 of those coming in the campaign’s final stretch. The automated accounts retweeted Republican candidate Trump 10 times more often Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, and accounted for 4.25% of all of Trump’s retweets in the race’s final days, according to Twitter’s statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

They also fired off nearly 200,000 retweets in the same time for WikiLeaks, which exposed stolen information from Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee that U.S. intelligence agencies have traced to Russian hackers.

Facebook, meanwhile, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that Russian trolls posing as American activists created 129 political events between 2015 and 2017, which were seen by more than 300,000 Facebook users and in some cases drew demonstrators to the streets en masse. About 62,500 users said they would attend one of the events and another 25,800 users expressed interest in going. 

The events often preyed on divisive political or cultural issues, and sometimes set up demonstrations that would directly oppose each other or conflict with plans from actual activists. In one instance, according to Facebook, a fake page called “Heart of Texas” that called for the state to secede from the country promoted a “Stop Islamization of Texas” protest in May 2016 for the opening of an Islamic Center’s library. Another Kremlin Facebook group, “United Muslims of America,” promoted a “Save Islamic Knowledge” event for the same time.

This is what results from simply wanting to be spoon fed the news, and not utilizing our critical thinking skills. 

The Russians recognized that Americans had become sheep and they helped to herd us right over a cliff.

Advertiser says he puts commercials on Fox News because their viewers are "extremely gullible" and "f*cking idiots."

Courtesy of DML News:  

The CEO of SCOTTeVEST recently claimed that his company advertises on Fox News because the network’s viewers are “extremely gullible” and “f**cking idiots.” 

Scott Jordan, whose company sells a vest which features multiple inside pockets designed to carry items such as a phone, tablet, water bottle and more, posted his derogatory comments on Facebook, Breitbart News reported. 

“I love meeting new people that recognize me and my company from all of our television commercials,” Jordan wrote. “I am on a ski lift and the following exchange just happened and happens often.” 

Jordan wrote that he asks the person where they saw his advertisement. “Invariably people say FOXNews.” 

“I laugh to myself,” Jordan wrote, “and tell them that we primarily advertise on Fox because we find their viewership to be extremely gullible and much easier to sell than other networks.” 

Jordan then mocks his potential customers. “The look on their face at that time is priceless. I am not kidding you. I get to tell them they are fucking idiots while getting rich off them.”

As you may have guessed the company issued an apology and claimed that they did not share these views.

Jordan was also forced to apologize and has since deleted his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Yep, those Fox viewers simply cannot accept the truth.

Especially when it is about them.

Missouri Senate candidate has some rather antiquated views of women's rights. And yes he's a Republican.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

In a statement posted to Facebook on Tuesday, (Courtland)Sykes said that he had been asked if he “supports women’s rights.” 

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner every night at six,” Sykes said, referring to demands he makes of his girlfriend. “One that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.” 

According to Sykes, feminists push an agenda that they “made up to suit their own nasty snake-filled heads.” 

The candidate said that he hoped his daughters do not grow up to be “career obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings they are [SIC] think they could have leaped in a single bound — had men not been ‘suppressing them.’ It’s just nuts.” 

Sykes ended his rant by insisting that he supports women’s rights “but not the kind that has suppressed natural womanhood for five long decades.” 

“But good news,” he concluded. “They’re finished. Ask Hillary.”

And this guy is go up against Claire McCaskill?

She will clean his clock, and then teach him to make his own damn dinner.  

Facebook's questionnaire to identify trustworthy news sources leaves a lot to be desired.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed:  

Last week, Facebook said its News Feed would prioritize links from publications its users deemed "trustworthy" in an upcoming survey. Turns out that survey isn't a particularly lengthy or nuanced one. In fact, it's just two questions. 

Here is Facebook's survey — in its entirety: 

Do you recognize the following websites

• Yes 
• No 

How much do you trust each of these domains?

• Entirely 
• A lot 
• Somewhat 
• Barely 
• Not at all 

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed this as the only version of the survey in use. They also confirmed that the questions were prepared by the company itself and not by an outside party.

Uh....is that it?

Do you want InfoWars to be listed as a trusted news outlet.

Because this is how you get InfoWars listed as a trusted news outlet.

Right Wingers and Russian trolls will simply flood the questionnaire with responses and we will end up with Alex Jones, Russia Today, and the White House web page as the only sources listed on our Facebook news feed.

Representatives Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff send letter to Mark Zuckerburg urging him to investigate Russian bots pushing the #releasethememo campaign.

Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Schiff have sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and @jack urging them to investigate involvement of Russian bots pushing #releasethememo campaign. Here’s my story about it that they cited: https://t.co/YNufBFfOCR pic.twitter.com/5WaTjKh7PM

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 23, 2018

Good for them.

Since our own Justice Department and the Republicans are currently busy helping the Russians to undermine the FBI and the Mueller investigation, I guess we have to turn to the powers that be behind social media to help protect the American people.

Keep in mind that there is STILL no actual coherent plan from this administration to prevent or deal with the next foreign interference in our election process.