Thursday, October 12, 2017

Olivia Beavers — Pinterest acknowledges Russia-linked political posts appeared on the site


Censorship marches on.
Pinterest, the social media website known for bookmarking recipes or fashion ideas, was used to spread Russia-linked political posts during the 2016 presidential election.
Pinterest became a repository for political posts created by Russians actors after other users on the web "pinned" the content to the scrapbook-like site, the company acknowledged to The Washington Poston Wednesday.

It does not appear that the Russian operatives posted directly on the site, but their presence on Pinterest grew as users unknowingly bookmarked the Russian propaganda to their online boards.

“We believe the fake Facebook content was so sophisticated that it tricked real Americans into saving it to Pinterest,” Pinterest head of public policy Charlie Hale told the newspaper. “We’ve removed the content brought to our attention and continue to investigate.”
Digital media execs running scared?

The Hill
Pinterest acknowledges Russia-linked political posts appeared on the site
Olivia Beavers

Also
The mobile game app Pokémon Go was reportedly used by a Russian-linked campaign to meddle in U.S. politics.
CNN reported that a Russian-linked campaign called "Don't Shoot Us," likely run by Moscow-linked "troll farm" Internet Research Agency (IRA), used Pokémon Go — among several other mediums including Facebook and Twitter — and posed as a part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Moscow-linked actors appear to be the source of the campaign that had a goal to raise racial tensions by bringing up incidents of police brutality.
The Hill
Russian-linked campaign used Pokémon Go to meddle in election

11 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Same thing here Tom:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Maybe the Ruskies should hire David Bossie ?

All they are doing is political positioning in advance of future updating McCain-Feingold to specifically include regulation of foreign powers activities around elections ....

If you don't see anything wrong with regulating firms/corporations in this way it's hypocritical to complain about foreign governments being regulated this way too....

Matt Franko said...

The campaigns would want to ideally control ALL political communication about any election campaign....

The Citizens United ruling pulled that back a bit...

All that is going to come out of this is that Russia supported entities are going to have to disclose their speech as political speech and that it was paid for by Russia government...

Matt Franko said...

All they're going to have to eventually do is put something like "Paid for by Old Neo-Soviet Sore Losers Against the USA" for disclosure at he end of all of their communications.... no big deal...

Tom Hickey said...

Nothing is ever mentioned about US allies using US PR firms to influence US politics and politicians.


In addition, the US is mongrel state. Different nationalities and ethnicities influence US politics through US citizens of those heritages.

In addition, most of this provable based on evidence. The Russian allegations, not so much.

In fact, Russiagate is traceable to Ukrainian influence.

Zbig was a Pole with traditional Polish Russophia. He as much as any one led the Russophobia charge against "Russia" when it was the USSR.

Interestingly, too, Stalin was not a Russian, he was a Georgian, and Hitler was not a German, but an Austrian.

Matt Franko said...

Well if Russia had a government they could develop their own legislation also....

Matt Franko said...

Tom the campaigns ideally want to control ALL communications related to the elections...

They are using Russia as a whipping boy to make their case wrt regulating that type of speech around elections/political campaigns...

Tom Hickey said...

Well if Russia had a government they could develop their own legislation also....

The Duma is the legislature of the Russian Federation. It is presently controlled by the United Russia party, presently holding ~ 80% of the seats.

Here is the result of the latest election.

Tom Hickey said...

Tom the campaigns ideally want to control ALL communications related to the elections...

This is about controlling the narrative. Whoever controls the narrative generally wins. It is very difficult to win without controlling the narrative, which is way one or the other of the two establishment factions always wins, until Trump.

Of course and they weren't concerned with "Russia" in this election but rather Bannon and Sanders, who were upsetting the apple cart. The DNC was able to isolate Sanders but the GOP couldn't deal with Bannon.

Now Bannon is fixated on taking over the GOP, and Sander the Democratic Party. Bannon has a good shot at it, but Sanders not so much, yet anyway. The Democratic establishment is dug in deep.

Matt Franko said...

Just let them come up with the regs and go to court like Citizens United did... no biggie...

All they will end up having to do is disclose who they are and who paid for it...

"Paid for by Defeated Disgruntled Old Soviet's Against Democracy, V. Putin, Treasurer" or something like that...

Tom Hickey said...

As far as has been disclosed, the "Russian" ads on FB and Twitter were traced to Russia. No evidence that they were traced to the Russian government or the Kremlin. This post is about Pinterest echoing them.

Moreover, over half the ads cited were placed after the election, and the ads were not consistent in promoting a candidate or position.

The charge has come down to "he Russians" implying the Russian government aka "the Kremlin," placed some ads that reflected US news reports in order to amply discord in the US and thereby undermine US democracy.

Absurd.

Matt Franko said...

The comms can come in from the external sector via the socials now so the regs are going to have to be updated to take this into account is all.... no biggie all it leads to is a simple requirement for disclosure....