If troll farms are capable of influencing an American federal, presidential election, then we may as well just call it a day and elect a dictator.

I wouldnt sign this statement. You obviously cant prevent them from influencing any American voters at all. Some few people will always be susceptible. The question is if they can meaningfully influence American elections. And considering how tight many elections have been in recent years, it's not out of the question that a massive, targetted Russian propaganda campaign (which faaaar exceeds the stuff they did in 2016) would be able to change some 0.3% of the vote or so. (Biden's margin in AZ and GA, Trump's margin in MI in 2016.)

so if i have a car going somewhere doesnt cost gas. ok. nice logic.



i believe u mean swing the election, of which it certainly did not. influence is a very low bar, and i think we should try to stop foreign influence from the shadows, regardless of it swinging anything.

Like I just said, their troll farms were already up and running, their key personnel on the governments' payroll. Those troll farms were largely creating fixed costs, not operational costs like gas on a road trip.
The extra costs for the higher power consumption of their servers, or for hiring a couple of interns for a few months, are absolute peanuts. They probably pale in comparison to even the puny $150k they paid to facebook.

If a handful of people see something and think "wow", I don't count that as influencing the election.

4chan has a significantly better chance of impacting public opinion than Russian / Israeli / Chinese troll farms do.

plz link me the documents stating costs and confirming they didnt increase operations specifically for the 2016 election. you're speculating, wildly, on what the possible costs of international espionage costs from a country that would never admit the true costs, let alone the extent they're even operating at.

There are a million forces trying to affect elections. Both foreign and domestic, corporate and public, and so on. I just don't like the leap from Russia influenced our election (maybe somewhat minimally) with Facebook ads to it's the reason Trump won and Trump is compromised therefore we're going to spend the next 4 years repeating lies as headlines and even launch a multi-million dollar investigation which will be a source for headlines implying guilt for 3+ years. Then when that investigation turns out basically nothing of value the media just quickly pivoted away from the story. I don't really understand why some of you guys pretend it was some objective impartial attempt that didn't target Trump when it was so consistent with the #resist campaign.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Nov 25 2020 11:20am

here are my opinions:

1. the pre investigation something seemed fishy, likely pointed to troll farms and/or facebook ads being improper activity
2. the full blown mueller investigation was silly, a waste of time, collusion was dumb to even go after
3. a proper investigation would have been a far cheaper broader scope look at how social media is affecting our elections, and any potential fixes, be they legislation or more likely leaning on facebook. twitter, etc to clean shit up
4. while the investigation was too pricey, the manafort case specifically was fruit born, even if it wasnt worth the cost
5. FISA warrants and they're stupidly low bar for evidence should be the prevailing headline, and should be fixed
6. lastly, corporate influence generally requires registration so we can at least try and track it, unlike russian troll farms or laundered facebook ad buys. regardless of their impact, no me gusta.

i dont find any of these to be conflicting, all have adjusted with hindsight somewhat, and they neither condemn nor champion what happened.

Honestly if Trump hadn't done a bunch of obstruction to slow the process it would have been over in less than 6 months lol

Facts don't care about your feelings.



I wouldn't say we should call it a day but Americans are pretty damn impressionable. Take a look at how STUPID Ghot is. He is more representative of the GOP base than anyone else on this forum.


It wasn't just Facebook ads. They also engaged in a disinformation campaign, they hacked the DNC, etc. Having said that, no one serious is saying "Hillary only lost b/c of Russia." Hillary lost primarily because she ran a poor campaign in the Rust Belt. I'd say that the Comey press conference had a larger influence than anything Russia did.

Trump has some very suspicious behavior towards Russia but I always felt that if there was any merit to him being compromised, the CIA, FBI, etc. would know about it. If Trump WAS compromised and the intel community DIDN'T know about it...well we have much bigger problems don't we?

Maybe the issue with your characterization of the media stems from headlines, 1 minute segments, etc. The term collusion is very loaded and could mean a wide variety of things. One end of the spectrum is border line treason and I imagine conservatives thought liberals were accusing Trump himself of those things. That's obviously nonsensical and people who believe that are morons. At some point, people need to take responsibility for themselves and actually read a fucking article. At the end of the day though, the Russia collusion narrative was DWARFED by things like #MeToo, school shootings, hurricanes, etc.