Discussion: Dem Floats New Rules For Online Ads After Facebook Reports Sales To Russia

Great, a whole new set of regulations affecting troll farmers. Leave it to the government to micromanage the ag sector.

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ā€œIf you put up content on television, even if I canā€™t find who funded the content, we know whether that contentā€” if it is affecting an election, if it is foreign-based content and you can look at the content,ā€ he said. ā€œUnder the internet, weā€™re not even able, as the American public, to look at the type of ads that these Russians were posting on some of these pages and some of these sites. I think we need to revisit that perhaps from a legal standpoint as well.ā€

Oh, for fuckĀ“s sake. Hundreds of millions of dark money bucks coming from god knows which American oligarchs poisons our elections right now, and WarnerĀ“s got his tit in the wringer over 100K of potentially Russian money on facebook. Maybe, just maybe, we should tackle the known manipulators of our elections first. Or at least at the same time.

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Good luck in getting that done, Senator Warner.

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The Washington Post findings ā€œmay be just the tip of the iceberg.ā€

You can take that to the Vnesheconombank!

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The internet is the largest experiment in social interaction in human history, and it is woefully unregulated. Right now it is far too easy for the Mercers, Bannons, and Putins to weaponize it.

Remember: A person with 1 or 2 core principles, and a ruthless willingness to bend any truth that gets in the way, can do very well for himself in law school. Certainly, this requires skill. But it would be a sad day for the progress of human knowledge if we called it intelligence.

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Hey, you try to sell Real Estate downwind of one of those places.

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And the Internet is requisite in current society. Be it for occupational or educational purposes or just plain old socializing. Itā€™s chilling how easy it is to be manipulated by rogue (and not so rogue) actors while remaining blissfully unaware.

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Counter-espionage investigation for each social media or internet ad? That may require a few new hires.

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Though we know that American oligarchs dark money have been affecting elections for a long time, until that argument finally reaches this level, its unfortunately settled at this point.

Foreign influence is supposedly a big ā€˜no-noā€™ in American elections, however a particular (and pivotal) part of the populace is possibly (?) cool with foreign influence having their say in our elections; which of course is a big ā€˜no-noā€™, because foreign influence is disliked in American elections, butā€¦

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We want to at least be able to pretend that our elections arenā€™t predetermined.

"ā€¦8 percent of all of the Twitter accounts are fake,ā€ he said. ā€œHow many of those originate out of Russia? And how many of those were used in the process? We donā€™t know.ā€

We donā€™t know, but Twitter does. Twitter can tell where the traffic is coming from and if it seems suspicious, block it and issue a warning to the account owner requiring them to prove itā€™s a personal account. Twitter can easily put a stop to the bot farms that infest it, but they want the ad revenue, thatā€™s more important to them than facilitating in the spread of false news that impacts our Democracy.

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Job creation!

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Tell me if IĀ“m wrong, but I believe that the CU decision does not address a right of political donors to maintain anonymity per se. Identifying donors could be legislated.

Anyway, I still think that Russian interference, while worthy of condemnation, pales in comparison to our homegrown manipulators.

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/06/243022966/secret-persuasion-how-big-campaign-donors-stay-anonymous

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It could be, but is there any stomach to do it?

ā€¦ k

Read the same article. From what I took away, the ruling allows anonymous giving because of existing conditions that could be legislated. I get that itĀ“s difficult, but we are responding to an article about a legislator who is proposing, potentially, legislation, so it seems legit to ask why heĀ“s not going after the bigger problem.

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And it may well turn out that the Russians improved their ability by directly coordinating with our Mercer-financed homegrown fellas. The investigations into Cambridge/Analytica and Jarediā€™s data-mining for his new high tech/low $ media campaign are overdue.

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Did the Russians fund efforts to provoke Bernie supporters through social media trolling?

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