31 Comments
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Karen Scofield's avatar

Thank You, Oliver, for writing about All the Disinformation out there! The American people are Not all clueless, but allot of of people simply don't that their being manipulated?! I'm thankful for you listening some of the Usual Suspects,so folks can reference for themselves. Once again, Corporate Media only covers the "Scandalous Drama" not what it's doing to our nation or the public at large. I applaud you on another excellent piece this morning.💙🇺🇸

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Oliver Markus Malloy's avatar

Thank you for the feedback, Karen!

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Risë Taylor's avatar

Thanks for gathering info in one place. I'm certain I have interacted w trolls, mostly knowingly, lol

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Thomas's avatar

Yes, I’m certain I have interacted with them, too. I developed a knack for sniffing them out in comments online. Often they posed as “concerned” Americans just tryna point out this and that in a “both sides” way. After awhile I’d be seeing the same screen names, sometimes seemingly supporting Dems, then attacking “libtard policies” in another. Many were rabidly anti (fill in the blank). It’s tiresome posting counter arguments and probably only helpful to the troll farm operatives in terms of gaining them ammunition for the Kremlin’s agenda. So I’ve ceased my efforts 100% and devote my energies here on Substack instead.

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Cheese And Politics's avatar

Here in Canada we looooove the CBC!!! Adrian Arsenault is so amazing! Sorry, just couldn’t keep it to myself.

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Dave the Spot-on Moron's avatar

This is literally the biggest story regarding US politics and the upcoming presidential election and I’ve heard little in the “mainstream media” about it.

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Hannah Byrum's avatar

Thanks for the links!

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Kay-El's avatar

Appreciate the article on Jessikka Aro. It’s good to see journalists in other countries tackling this issue as well.

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Autumn of the Species's avatar

arrgh. fut a whuckingMess

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Gale's avatar

Thank you for this info.

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WTH Is Going On?! Chris Berrie's avatar

Any thoughts on why we’ve known most of this for 8 years and it’s only coming to a head now?

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Oliver Markus Malloy's avatar

I've been asking myself that for years.

I have been writing about Russian trolls for years and it has been absolutely bizarre that the corporate media just ignores that a foreign army of disinformation agents is promoting fascism and civil war in western democracies, to destroy us from the inside.

You'd think the media would be all over this, but nope. Sports, celebrity gossip, and ratings are more important than saving democracy.

It might also be a factor, that billionaires own the corporate media and social media, and billionaires want to get more billionaire tax cuts from Trump.

Their profits are more important to them than the good of the country or the lives of working class people.

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Sebastian Crankshaw's avatar

If billionaires aren't talking about it, it's probably because billionaires favour it. Tax cuts, yes, but if Russian disinfo is destabilising democracy and billionaires favour it, why would that be? Peter Thiel and his acolytes are a great place to start looking. Paris Marx' 'Tech won't save us' podcast has done a lot of fantastic research on that particular rabbit hole, which may well be informative.

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Virginia from Maryland's avatar

One has to wonder why more resource wasn't employed to combat Russian disinfo campaigns, and why did it take until Oct 24 for the story to break about Elon Musk's contacts with Putin? i keep saying Russia invaded the US without firing a shot.

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Jeffrey's avatar

Boris truly exists on many a comment section.

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TJTarheel's avatar

I’m going to watch “agents of chaos now.” It’s a huge problem. Putin has helped trump every step

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It’s Time's avatar

This is older. It’s more now. They have over a thousand maybe more now, working shifts in cubicles with multiple profiles on all formats, yahoo, aol, bing, twit, tic, face and others using russian/chinese ai for not only US dialect, for regional us dialect. They support and answer their own comments with their multiple profiles. They additionally use their ai in real time on chats to communicate with pre programmed objectives to sway opinions. They are now infiltrating into Substack. They are using what they call soft sell tactics in here.

Isn’t that special. We have corporate owned sm sites happy to accommodate them all for that dollar. Isn’t that nice. 👍

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christopher wilson's avatar

I knew when I was conversing with a troll, and immediately went to their profile,which inevitably had clues you could discern that it was fake. I then blocked them and reported them to admins. It happened so often it drove me of Facebook for seven years. It started happening again last summer. It’s still happening. Wake up America, you’ve been had. While Zuckerberg stares down Bezos’ hooker girlfriend’s cleavage, our country is being taken over by the Nazi sitting next to him.

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Sebastian Crankshaw's avatar

Carole Cadwalladr has done a lot of work on this in terms of UK politics, Cambridge Analytica links to Nigel Farage and Brexit and much more. I do think it's a mistake to look at this as a 'Putin' thing, though. Like that last cartoon strikes me as far too simplistic and one-sided. Geopolitics isn't a film, there isn't a moustache-twirling supervillain controlling everything. There's a planet and a global economic system, led by corporate interests and backed by the US military, that is rapidly draining the planet of the resources needed to sustain civilisation and, indeed, large swathes of life as we know it. Within that system, there are multiple actors with varying degrees of power and interests that intersect and diverge.

Trump may well be influenced by Putin, but he's also massively backed by the world's richest man and supported by Peter Thiel. That tech oligarchy has collosal power independently of Russia. That faction, for want of a better term, has built an alliance with the evangelical, end times right in the US, who also have significant control over fossil fuel resources. Then there's asset management firms like BlackRock who own massive swathes of our global infrastructure.

I'm not claiming to know, at all, all these different groups and interests and the interplay between them, but I'm trying to suggest some of the more obvious ones I can see because the lens of material interests and intersecting loci of power and resources is a much better lens for understanding geopolitics than 'Russian Trolls Vs Democracy'.

There's a lot of useful info here, it'd be interesting to link it into a wider and deeper network of understanding. The web as well as this single thread.

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It’s Time's avatar

Nice to see there is another that gets it. It’s not easy to make it short to explain it is it. They count on americans short attention spans and well, being bluntly honest, stupidity.

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Larry D’Merritt's avatar

This really isn’t that big of a story when you consider in the US there are thousands of disinformation trolls doing the same thing at Fox, Breitbart, NewsMax, OAN, etc.

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