--come on. You want to change the opinion of the entire population of
a country, and do it in an invisible untraceable manner?
> And B. is naive, and Putin isn't naive. How well did Clinton Shut down
> Whitewater? Reagan Iran Contra? Nixon Watergate?
--why is B naive? Putin simply did not care it it were known he did
it. He wanted Trump. If
Trump shut down investigations, for example the same way that JF
Kennedy appointed his brother Attorney General, plus relied on his pal
Boss Daley in Chicago ad his judicial appointees, who together then
shut down all investigations into the clear election frauds that
occurred in the 1960 election that elected Kennedy, then fine with
Putin.
If, on the other hand, Trump gradually slides into a sea of lies and
the investigators came after him with either small or large success,
then also fine with Putin. Either way, Putin regards situation as a
great success for him.
And in any case, whether or not that is so, the fact is, Putin did it.
> "-it is pretty clear there was a conspiracy to produce "fake news"
> which did genuinely get produced, was genuinely massively pro-trump
> anti-clinton, did have an effect on the election of the right order of
> magnitude to throw it, and was produced in substantial part by forces
> under Putin control. Plus US intel actually intercepted a command from
> Putin to do it. Plus Putin then did the same kind of thing
> (unsuccessfully this time) to the French election that followed.
>
> So the debate on that is over. "
>
> There sure was a lot of fake news, unfortunately the only actual study done
> on the effect of fake news on the election concluded it was not decisive.
>
https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
--well, first. We know there was a lot of fake news. We know from
the buzzfeed study
it was massively pro-trump / anti-hillary biased. We know the total
amount of fake news readership and re-posting was of the same order of
magnitude or more as needed to swing the election.
Second. In the study you just cited, they say on pp.212-213:
"Second, we confirm that fake news was both widely shared and heavily tilted
in favor of Donald Trump. Our database contains 115 pro-Trump fake stories that
were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41
pro-Clinton fake stories
shared a total of 7.6 million times.
Third, we provide several benchmarks of the rate at which voters were exposed
to fake news. The upper end of previously reported statistics for the
ratio of page
visits to shares of stories on social media would suggest that the 38
million shares
of fake news in our database translates into 760 million instances of
a user clicking
through and reading a fake news story, or about three stories read per American
adult. A list of fake news websites, on which just over half of
articles appear to be false,
received 159 million visits during the month of the election, or 0.64
per US adult. In
our post-election survey, about 15 percent of respondents recalled
seeing each of 14
major pre-election fake news headlines, but about 14 percent also
recalled seeing a
set of placebo fake news headlines--untrue headlines that we invented
and that never
actually circulated. Using the difference between fake news headlines
and placebo
headlines as a measure of true recall and projecting this to the
universe of fake news
articles in our database, we estimate that the average adult saw and
remembered 1.14
fake stories."
Considering that and the closeness of the election result, don't you
think it is plausible this swung the election? These numbers make it
obvious the effect was of
the correct order of magnitude or larger.
Third. You just said "the only actual study done
on the effect of fake news on the election concluded it was not decisive"
but unfortunately for your bullshit, what that study actually said
(their "conclusion" page 232) was:
"In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, it was alleged that fake
news might have been pivotal in the election of President Trump. We do
not provide
an assessment of this claim one way or another."
You might want to try reading the study first, and telling me what it
concluded afterwards.
And if that is a "naive" view of how one should proceed by me, then so be it.
--In the French election, which elected Macron. who took office 14 May 2017,
Macron continued to claim the Russians had been trying to influence
the election (against him) including via cyber means, after he took
office. For example see this 29 May story
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-05-29/frances-macron-alongside-putin-denounces-two-russian-media-for-election-meddling
And wikipedia:
"Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by
the Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En Marche !
had been the target of phishing attacks.[174] Trend Micro said that
the group conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy
Bear."
So, evidently, if the French intel agency finds no evidence it was Putin, Macron
disagrees. Also, it is know that Le Pen (Macron opponent) had visited
Russia and obtained campaign financing.
I suppose one could claim Macron is lying, but there are certain facts that were
not due to Macron, such as that financing+visit, and also it is just
another strange "coincidence" that Macron should come up with this lie
right at this time,
purely coincidentally.
--there may be some validity to all that ranting, but it is not relevant to
the question of whether Putin tried to influence US election, and
whether that influence was large enough that it plausibly swung it.
The fact is, he did, and it was that large.
You and I both may dislike that fact, but it is by now a sufficiently
established fact
that I have to accept it.
And yes, the New York Times and the Washington Post and fact-checking
agencies like
politifact are, while far from perfect, the best seekers of truth we
have got on this planet now. It is pathetic how Donald Trump, after
being elected plausibly as a result of fake news, then acted as though
the New York Times and Washington Post were (in his actual words)
"fake news." Well no. They are actual news. Fake news is stories
that, e.g. say they are from ABC News, complete with ABC logo and all,
but were never produced by ABC, they simply were fraudulent. Those
are the kinds of fake news stories compiled by
the Buzzfeed study.