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Big Times story on the huge Russian social media effort to influence the Brexit referendumhttps://t.co/NE7FwmPvhh pic.twitter.com/REdGjjRgOZ
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In any case the greatest users of Twitter - the young - were least likely to vote for Brexit.
Did Russian meddling play a role? Possibly, but its unmeasurably small. Things like no temporary control on immigration from the A8 (however beneficial it was) will have been many orders of magnitude more important...and then there's the bus, the losers unaccountably keep drawing attention to....
Will some claim this invalidates the result?
Quite likely, nearer the event, as one by one their Firewalls crumble.....
https://medium.com/dfrlab/botspot-twelve-ways-to-spot-a-bot-aedc7d9c110c
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/930662640183062528
Or another example: you're a journalist. You like people reading your stories. Every time you write a story about topic x, lots of people tweet saying how brilliant the article was an how it's good to hear some sense for once. They retweet links to the articles, so readership is higher.
So you write more of the same, more fervently. Except many of the retweeters and praise-givers don't really exist.
It should be remembered that this is not just one or two accounts; it is happening at a massive scale, with large numbers of accounts.
Yes, I'd call that straw clutching......
Famous historical anecdote: In 1972 Nixon, or Kissinger, or Whoever, asked Zhou Enlai what the long-term consequences of the French Revolution would be.
"It's too early to tell," was the sage reply, supposedly exemplifying the Chinese attitude of long-term-ism. But it turns out that Zhou probably misunderstood the question, and was talking about the student riots in Paris in 1968. The misapprehension was not corrected by the interpreter, who recognised the enigmaticness of the occasion.
Meanwhile, the Most Gorgeous Man Who Has Ever Lived in 40 today.
Who is this usurper?
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1DF0GC
Not that the thicko mainstream media will point out this inverse correlation.
Whistleblowers have revealed that the Kremlin tried to influence the Brexit referendum and US Presidential race using fake social media accounts.
Political analyst Matt Turner said: “I would agree that Russian intervention has become an excuse for losing sides like Hillary and in Brexit.
“Deep down it is an excuse and it is a hyperbolic one at that.”
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/879716/Russia-Twitter-social-media-fake-news-Brexit-referendum-Hillary-Clinton?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225637/How-Kremlin-hijacked-Labour-Diary-Kremlin-insider-reveals-hold-Soviets-Labour-politicians.html
For instance, read this petition aloud and ask what the chances may be that it came from eastern Europe, or not.
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/178844
I use my soft power to project influence around the world
You work hard to get your preferred candidate elected
They run troll farms to subvert democracy.
We’ve all been doing it for years, it’s only in the news now because of those who are trying to discredit Trump and/or Brexit.
"The union's patronage was ubiquitous. Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, as well as Cabinet ministers Margaret Beckett, Harriet Harman and John Reid, were all sponsored by TGWU and made their Labour Party careers thanks to it.
The control the Soviets had over Labour, its leadership and aspiring politicians, is still having a profound impact on Britain.
As the Spectator says: 'Indeed, New Labour, which has governed since 1997, cannot be understood unless these communist influences are taken into account.
'Many of New Labour's characteristics - its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, the embedded preference for striking deals out of the public eye, and its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists, result from the lengthy detente with the Kremlin.'"
It's hilarious. It's as if, in 2015, they finally used up all their smear reserves and it now no longer works.
He (or his acolytes) may invite people on RT, recycle a bit of international funds here and there to organisations they like, send a few tweets, employ astroturfers and the like, but that's all they do. Manipulating the results of a democratic vote is a real stretch.
I'd suggest Obama's intervention did more damage to Remain than Putin.
The issue we have with Russia is/are state cyber security, dirty money/mafioso Russians spraying their cash all over London, preventing the occasional state sponsored assassination of Putin's critics on our territory (which are utterly outrageous) and having the courage to stand up to them in Eastern Europe.
Start with SeanT.
"I thank the Lord that I've been blessed,
With more than my share of a penis..."
Nobody would want to trash the UK economy if they really loved the UK.
Go on Twitter. It already is being argued by the kind of losers who put #RemainRebellion or Proud Saboteur in their profile and have been clutching at every available straw since June 24th 2016.
"He lives in Bristol with his Russian wife Katya, formerly named Ekaterina Paderina. In 2001 she married Eric Butler, a British seaman twice her own age, but the union ran aground after three months. The Home Office questioned the authenticity of the marriage, and might have deported her were it not for the intervention of her local MP, the Liberal Democrat Mike Hancock. In a curious footnote, MI5 (the Security Service, responsible for counter-espionage) later accused Hancock’s assistant and girlfriend Katya Zatuliveter of being a Russian agent, although she was cleared in a national security court in 2011."
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/26/who-funded-brexit/
Where Banks got his money is quite a difficult trail too:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brexitinc/adam-ramsay/how-did-arron-banks-afford-brexit
This is also curious:
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/tag/ekaterina-paderina/
Russias interest in Brexit is more than a few troll farms.
https://twitter.com/MikeH_PR/status/926360969403600896
What can be done about it? If anything?
Apart from prosecuting individuals who can be presumed to know what was happening?
What would make the referendum result look sketchy would be if they can pin the money spent by the Leave campaign to a hostile foreign government. But even there, whether you can do anything about it (like a new referendum) ultimately depends on internal Conservative Party politics, and I doubt this would swing many of them. It might even swing them the other way; If the Russians are shown to have money and political influence, not to mention potential blackmail material, wouldn't MPs want them on their side?
Unfortunately, Remain astroturfers, including those in influential positions, don't seem to understand that we've had the vote.
That does not mean that Russia's involvement was acceptable. Mrs May is quite right to call them out on this as are the investigations going on in the US about similar activities. Russia has been and remains a gangster state, killing its opponents, subverting democracy, causing trouble wherever it can.
We should not go on pretending that this is some slightly misguided democracy with whom we share any significant values. I suggest a first step will be requiring Russian business to remove itself from the UK. Their involvement in our energy business, for example, is not acceptable. There has to be consequences for this but it will not include the result of the referendum.
We live in a democracy. Many might have been persuaded to vote Remain by the leader of a foreign power. Obama.
A week or two ago I put a small sum on at 6.5 that we'd have another vote. This sort of thing makes it more likely.
Psychologically, those who preferred we remain but respect the vote might feel a lot more inclined to vote to remain in a second referendum if the cause of said vote was interference in the first one.
Of course, if we had another vote then there would be huge bitterness regardless of how the result went.
Would you have been this blasé about Russian meddling it Remain had won 52/48 and it later transpired Putin’s troll army had been backing Remain ?
like Mr Junkerswho certainly spent money trying to secure a remain vote. Or is that going too far? Probably.Whether the Russians actually had any marked influence or not, it must be remembered that Remain had such an inbuilt advantage - prestige of government, resources of the state, the EU itself and the status quo. It was also one in which the Electoral Commission allowed Government to ride a coach and horses through the recommendations for campaign and timing following Indy Ref, that to have lost from their starting position was seen as almost an impossibility.
If the EC are convinced it was the 'Russians what Won it' - run the same referendum again, the same question - now - as a snap 30 days with no campaign time and no time for anyone to get organised. The arguments are already well played out since the vote.
https://twitter.com/GOsborneGenius/status/930706944666624000
And you're worried about 'Twatter' influencing the vote.
Brexit won by 1.3 million votes. We're leaving.
EDIT On the basis that you think hacking can cause swings of that size, perhaps the Lib Dems should be investigated? Their votes might be solely due to hacking!
If they had the parly numbers they wouldn't be so loud.
Incidentally, I was at a farming conference yesterday and one of the farming representatives said ruefully that during the referendum campaign several of the leading Leave campaigners promised cheaper food. He agreed that this was not in reality likely to happen, rather the reverse.
There was plenty of opportunity to hear and read things straight from the horse's mouth. So what if there was noise at the margin? Caveat emptor.
Nobody is saying Russia can't have their opinion and express it, this is about masquerading as UK voters.
It's hard to believe that Twitter was the only way in which the Russians sought to influence the elections - financing looks a very ripe area for investigation - but, again, the Leave win was not a huge surprise when you see it in the context of all that had happened over the previous decade and even beyond.
More generally, though, it does seem as if the Russians have a very sophisticated and coordinated destabilisation campaign going on. It's not just the referendum and the US election, of course. We know it happened in the French presidential election and strong evidence is now emerging of heavy Russian interest in events in Catalonia.
b) You think we didn't meddle in USSR politics? Paybacks a bitch, as Mr Putin might say.
c) You REALLY think Putin influenced the final result?
d) Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.......
Where is an example of egregious lying about Brexit that the Brexiters didn't use themselves?
When the trials come you will be exiled to Twatt or Middlesbrough.
If you support Scottish Nationalism then you’re a tool (of Russia)
We've already established that Remainers are people so intellectually void that they were outwitted by a bus. Indeed we know this becasue they regularly come on on PB and boast of the fact.
Now it seems that not only have they been duped by a bus but that millions of them cant tweet and chew gum at the same tiime. They get easily confused by trolls who dont speak english as their first language sat 2000 miles away. Millions of them thought Leave meant staying in because they read it on the internet and now it turns out it doesnt.
I cant see any easy way out of this except to ban twitter and ask everyone saying they want to remain to go back to school to learn english.
They'll have to walk as their track history with buses isnt good.
A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.
I once asked a criminal barrister friends how often he thought juries got it right. “Almost always” was his reply.
I'm just trying to stop this ridiculous superficial false equivalence between deliberate covert misinformation by a geopolitical rival, and international institutions expressing a view openly.
As with Trump, Brexiters are willing to jettison their patriotic democratic credentials by normalizing this kind of covert deception.
So when it happens at a GE and Corbyn gets on, they won't be able to complain...
@paulhutcheon: Looks like there is going to be another @scottishlabour leadership contest
It's politics. As an aside, we must congratulate the Prime Minister on scooping The Times on this story. Obviously there is no connection there.