Bogus Russian News Story Shows How Election Disinfo Can ‘Hack Your Mind’ | Talking Points Memo

Turmoil here gives the Russian a much freer hand to interfere elsewhere .Belarus for example.
It also diminishes us overall. Short- and long-term benefits.

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Disinformation has two simultaneous purposes. The first - to get you to believe a falsehood. The second, to get you to believe ‘nothing is true’.

Either of those outcomes works for Russia/tRump.

They LITERALLY began their administration with blatant lies - and ‘alternative facts’.

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“Election veterans would quickly recognize that the voter roll information described — such as name, date of birth, and gender — is already publicly available in most states and usually pretty simple to obtain. Election officials in two of the states cited in the reports, Connecticut and Michigan, quickly confirmed as much to TPM.”

So fucking what? It can be publicly available information all day long, BUT IF THEY ACCESSED IT VIA HACKING THE SYSTEM INSTEAD OF JUST ASKING FOR IT NICELY AT THE SERVICE COUNTER, THEN THERE’S A FUCKING PROBLEM. I saw a whole buttload of tweets in response to this acting as if the problem was that the information is being released, pooh-poohing the issue by pointing out that the info is publicly available anyway. WAY TO MISS THE POINT. If reports are true that hacking of ANY election apparatus took place, then THAT is the problem. The nature and substance of the information hacked is SECONDARY.

And if you trust the FBI, CIA and DOJ under Trump and Barr and Wray to monitor and address Russia or other state actors trying to hack our elections if they think it’s being done pro-Trump in a swing state like MI, then you’re a fucking idiot.

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Oh my lord, my mind has been hacked. I knew there was a reason I couldn’t recognize the error I spent four hours trying to find, which turned out to involve the square root of three over two as opposed to the square root of two over two. It was Russians what did it.

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At least it was the Russians. If it had been Trump, you would have been stuck with the square root of two over negative two.

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Explains why readers of TPM wouldn’t even know that Trump has an opponent in this election.

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It’s Biden. Joe Biden.

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Just read this great little nick on twitter-

“Strokeahontas”

:smile:

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I didn’t hear about the “dark web,” but I fell for the substance of it – that the Russkies had gotten hold of voter info that they might use to influence voting. Day by day we’re seeing unintended consequences of the internet’s use in politics. It’s just so goddamned sobering.

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It really showcases the need to rethink how we teach in the digital era. For the longest time, imparting knowledge was the be all, end all of teaching. People didn’t have the ability to look up facts all the time, so they needed a certain amount of information as a baseline.

But now, we have instant access to vast arrays of knowledge at our fingertips, 24/7. What’s far more critical is teaching people how to sift and analyze that data. How should you think about the information that is presented to you so that you can trust it (or not)? Beyond the basics of the “Three Rs,” teaching critical thinking and how to process information is far more important in my view than teaching sets of facts to learn. Teaching people how to think should come first and then students can work on truly understanding history, literature, art, science, math, etc.

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Election veterans would quickly recognize that the voter roll information described — such as name, date of birth, and gender — is already publicly available in most states and usually pretty simple to obtain.

Is this true?

If so, then why do so many health care providers and banking personnel ask me for my date of birth—and little else—when trying to verify my identity?

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a Russian business daily… published a report

Donald Trump does business with Russia, the same way — manufactured lines of lies. Business. Not “law and order.” Not governing. Not capitalism.

Say NO to Putin. Vote for the Americans.
Biden/Harris 2020.

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Every person who has ever worked at Fox News: “Tell me something I don’t know.”

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Most of Trump’s math involves the imaginary axis.

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That’s the problem everyone is having. They are trying to map his world onto the standard x-y plane, but he’s not using the same axes as everyone else. If some enterprising person were to map it onto the imaginary axis, they would be able to crack the code. But in the end, it’s probably not worth that effort.

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In my experience most even moderately informed people are quite genuinely shocked when told that their voter registration data is public record. They automatically conflate this with the secret ballot principle. So this is a subject particularly ripe for misinformation efforts.

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There are dark shadows at play in Trump’s coordinate system.

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Undermining the concept of a free and fair election is a goal in and of itself.

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That’s a stroke of genius.

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It really is.

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