Alan: Here is my personal account of coming to realize that Russia was (almost certainly) responsible for flipping the vote of my lifelong friend's sister so that she could no longer follow her "Democratic Party instinct" and vote for Hillary.
Several months before the 2016 presidential election, my friend's sister saw a video of Hillary berating members of her campaign, vituperating in ways that were over-the-top-crazy and repulsively abusive.
I am an accomplished researcher and spent hours trying to locate the video in question.
I never found any clip that remotely resembled the one MD described.
At the time, neither F nor I knew that Russia was meddling in American politics.
Only in hindsight do we realize that this "fake news" video had the hallmarks of a "Putin production" and was imbued with enough emotional power to poison the outlook of a kind, sensitive woman, who -- in the absence of such venomous imagery -- would have been a "natural" Hillary voter.
Only in hindsight do we realize that this "fake news" video had the hallmarks of a "Putin production" and was imbued with enough emotional power to poison the outlook of a kind, sensitive woman, who -- in the absence of such venomous imagery -- would have been a "natural" Hillary voter.
Furthermore, if this clip had been real rather than propagandistic ephemera, it would have been seized upon by the Trump campaign to poison yet more gullible voters and would have been as easy to locate as the entire haystack that hides the proverbial needle.
Of course, I cannot reach an absolutely certain conclusion.
What I do know for fact is that Hillary lost a vote due to "fake news" that was (by my lights) part of an elaborate and expensive scam -- exactly the kind of inflammatory propaganda that Putin and his lickspittles had the budget to produce and "good" reason to spread.
Russian Ads, Now Publicly Released, Show Sophistication Of Influence Campaign
U.S. Lawmakers Release A Sample Of The 3,000 Russian Ads Bought On Facebook To Help Trump Win
https://money.good.is/slideshows/facebook-ads-russian-trump-win
https://money.good.is/slideshows/facebook-ads-russian-trump-win
No comments:
Post a Comment