How Twitter pushed RT to spend big on 2016 US election

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/407858-rt-twitter-us-election/

by gaius • 9 years ago

47 38 9 years ago

powertower• 9 years ago

That is more or less the main way the media in the US, the EU, and some other world regions, is operating right now.

For each major story, they remove all the real details, even the context, and just present you with a well crafted narrative which itself is mostly supported only by promises of inside-knowledge, secret/anon sources, and "proofs" that are never released.

Then after some time passes the details are re-introduced by the non-liars and the narrative collapses.

Except nothing changes because the general public has already been conditioned to want to be lied to daily and just moves on to the next fake-news story.

smoll• 9 years ago

They remove all the real details, even the context, and just present you a well crafted narrative that has no basis in reality.

I don't normally comment on political topics, but who are you talking about here? Is the "they" in this sentence RT or Twitter? Both have huge incentives to misrepresent facts to make themselves look good.

Except nothing changes because the general public has already been conditioned to want to be lied to daily and just moves on to the next fake-news story.

Sounds about right. I just assume both parties are lying here.

bhhaskin2• 9 years ago

They being the media. Journalistic integrity died years ago. We like to blame Russian for the last election outcome, but are quick to forget that mega corporations spent way more time and effort trying to sway the election. For some reason we are ok with Google trying to influence voters through recommends and search results, but aren't ok when Russian does the same thing using ads (on Google platforms). Google, Twitter, Facebook had no problem taking Russian money during the election.

danjoc• 9 years ago

Russia rigged the election with a couple of hundred thousand dollars in propaganda. Clinton spent more than a million dollars on CTR alone. The Koch Brothers dumped over one billion dollars according to some articles I've seen.

Either the Russians have vastly superior propaganda and probably in control of global politics or their influence in the US election is overstated.

DashRattlesnake• 9 years ago

The scandalous thing isn't this scale or the effects of the Russian effort, but that it occurred at all. Russia, unlike those other actors, is not permitted to get involved in US elections in this way.

megaman22• 9 years ago

It's incredibly naive to think that there aren't foreign parties involved in influencing elections and shifting public opinion; it's a tactic as old as civilization, and US intelligence agencies do it on a daily basis.

coldtea2• 9 years ago

So, like the US has been meddling with local politics all around the globe since forever, including supporting political parties, "NGOs" etc in Russia?

travmatt5• 9 years ago

Or RIS broke into state election boards to get hyper accurate data on voter and voting patterns unavailable within legal means, broke into campaigns to find information they could construe as satanic (like child sex slave rings run out of pizzeria shops), and then colluded with Republicans to distribute their propaganda to the most low information voters they could find in swing states for maximum impact.

vim_wannabe2• 9 years ago

Can someone link some of these "fake news articles" from rt.com? That sounds crazy, heh.

KGIII5• 9 years ago

The total number of people who believe in pizzagate is vanishingly small and I'm not actually sure they can properly mark a ballot without assistance.

They overlap heavily with people who think everything is a conspiracy, probably perpetuated by Jewish people. No, I'm not kidding. You can go to voat.co and watch them in action.

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they are mentally ill.

mbesto• 9 years ago

Russians have vastly superior propaganda and probably in control of global politics

Or maybe the nature of propaganda versus "factual news" is just that much more effective. It's not out of the realm of possibilities considering propaganda has been used effectively in all sorts of mediums for centuries now.

dionian• 9 years ago

if you recognize it as propaganda, it's not effective propaganda (on you)... if you dont notice the US's, then theirs is effective

awinder• 9 years ago

The truth may cost more to sell than targeted lies.

lumberjack• 9 years ago

Russia's propaganda was off-limits for the Clintons' and the Kochs' because it was mostly incitement of hatred against different groups of people.

KGIII5• 9 years ago

Before you yell at me, I will clarify that I'm very much on the left side of the political spectrum.

Didn't she call Trump supporters a 'basket of deplorables?'

I don't think incitement of hate against different groups of people was off limits for either side? There was a whole lot of hate going around.

scrollaway• 9 years ago

A couple hundred thousand dollars that we know of. Putin isn't known for being super transparent with his money...

The Twitter influence is certainly overstated, but Twitter wasn't the only source of influence (still isn't).

coldtea2• 9 years ago

Either the Russians have vastly superior propaganda and probably in control of global politics or their influence in the US election is overstated.

It serves two purposes:

1) Face-saving from out of touch with the population DNC/Clinton team that still can't fathom how they lost to an orange-utang

2) Keeping the lead orange-utang in a pro-war, pro-military expenses course against Russia, that everybody in the establishment loves

Maybe also as an experiment about how far BS can go if promoted by all the pundits...

gaius• 9 years ago

Right, but that is not the thrust of the article, which is that Twitter is whining now about RT, yet previously tried to sell them a political influence package!

everdev• 9 years ago

Don't we have a bigger issue if ad money can swing an election? Where's the critical thought on the part of the electorate?

FLUX-YOU• 9 years ago

Critical thought doesn't make you immune to propaganda.

moomin• 9 years ago

This is a really important point. Everyone thinks that they, personally, are immune to this sort of thing. Every scientific study suggests they’re wrong.

The Mercers and Putins of the world do this because it’s cost-effective.

bcg1• 9 years ago

Critical thought often requires intentional effort, even by those who value it. And many people that I come across do not even seem to value critical thought, especially when it comes to politics... to the contrary, there exists a movement promoting the idea that thinking is a practice that makes you some sort of elitist.

rndmize• 9 years ago

What critical thought? The electorate, especially on the right, as spoon-fed narratives and outrage pieces by pundits, analysts, talk-show hosts and entire news organizations. Information that doesn't fit the theme is downplayed or ignored; information that does is distorted, taken out of context or used in flawed ways - and this is naturally ignored by the audience.

For an easy, recent example, look at the Trump tax plan. This is constantly, repeatedly being sold as a "middle class tax cut". And yet it removes the estate tax, which only hits individuals with assets greats than 5.5 million or couples greater than 11 million. Cutting corporate taxes - why would this do anything? Corporate taxes are on profits, and if you're growing your business you aren't getting taxed anyway because you spend it instead - see Amazon and the whole "your margin is my opportunity" idea. How on earth would this lead to more growth? A doubled standard reduction, but other deductions are scrapped, mostly making things a wash; and a removal of the AMT, which hits the wealthy and some upper-middle class folk - none of this seems to really benefit the middle class, and you can pick that up merely by reading the proposal and some of the statements and analysis around it. (Just for good measure, the document itself: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4061905/Read-Pres... ).

And yet, the narrative of "middle class tax cuts" continues unabated. Maybe people don't have time to do the research; maybe they don't care, or maybe they don't feel qualified to contest experts and politicians. But the effect is that people make their decisions based on how they feel, and critical thought is largely non-existent.

nimos• 9 years ago

Has anyone seen what the promoted tweets were? Would be interesting to see which tweets got promoted.

The twitter report says:

"Based on our findings thus far, RT spent $274,100 in U.S. ads in 2016. In that year, the @RT_com, @RT_America, and @ActualidadRT accounts promoted 1,823 Tweets that definitely or potentially targeted the U.S. market. These campaigns were directed at followers of mainstream media and primarily promoted RT Tweets regarding news stories."

Which doesn't seem particularly nefarious to me. Does RT have a political bend to their organization? Probably. What state funded news organization doesn't? It's 270k on stuff that "definitely or potentially" targeted Americans? What does potentially mean and what is the breakdown? What % actually had to do with the election?

Also if I have the timeline correct Twitter bans RT from advertising two hours after they publish their side of the events?

How Twitter pushed RT to spend big on 2016 US election

Related Stories