I mean, I don’t even care if they do because the US is the king of messing with other countries politics, I was just wondering what peoples actual serious opinions here are on the whole Russiagate thing outside of (rightfully) mocking liberals obsession with it.
Far, far less than the US interferes in Russian politics
Less than the US interferes with everyone else’s politics.
To me it’s like, obvious that the federal system largely runs on bribes and buy-in. Given our international proclivities, it feels wildly hypocritical to be mad that other countries try to establish their own buy-in with our system.
Like, democrats will throw trans people under the bus for not donating enough and supporting leftists over them. They’re petty, punitive, and look at everything from a numbers pov - be that attention, sympathy/alignment, and most especially, straight up money.
That we often just pick a nation at random to make an Official Enemy every few years makes it entirely sensible that the international situation is one of people trying to protect themselves from that inevitability both domestically and in Washington DC
It’s hard to have a problem with it in that manner. It’s hard to care, because there’s no way Russian influence actually matters a whole lot beyond creating opportunities for their own buy-in to national concerns.
Its pretty well proven that they run bots on social media and fund really far right influencers. But the funding doesn’t seem to equal success unless the message already resonates with US conservatives. And there’s way more NATO bots, and even more IDF bots.
Russiagate is clearly bullshit. Failed attempt by liberals to make racism seem unamerican. But we’re preaching to the choir here.
Yeah they did fund Tim Pool and whoever else. So yeah, it is real, but not massive or anything compared with other countries/corporations/industries
Its pretty well proven that they run bots on social media
Who proved it? If there’s a smoking gun I missed I’m curious to read it and update my views.
Example of the stuff I have seen
Washington Post: Pro-Putin bots are dominating Russian political talk on Twitter
*Scrolls down*
The study does not provide direct evidence that the bots were created by the Russian government or how they were employed
First, your conflating the general bot paranoia with existing proofs. Just because libs are labeling anyone anti-nato as a bot doesn’t mean the bots don’t exist. They do, but their less common and pretty shitty when you do see them.
Second, your evidence shows that the pro-putin bots exist. Demanding a direct line of evidence that they originate from the Russian government itself is being willfully obtuse about how espionage generally works. Like I don’t have proof that all the NATO bots are directly contracted by NATO but they exist. Are you going to doubt that they come from NATO? (Pretty sure the IDF bots are actually well documented though).
I updated my comment just before you replied.
I believe some Russian bots must exist, but I’ve not seen proof. I also believe that NATO bots exist, but neither have I seen proof. If you had claimed that NATO bots were pretty well proven, I would instead be asking to see that proof; I’d be all over it!
Maybe I’m giving the research paper that WaPo is referencing too little credit, but I’d like to read it before I agree with their findings.[1] Even though that WaPo headline says “pro-Putin”, nothing in the article indicates that they selected only tweets that supported Putin. They did a broad sweep of any suspected bot behavior in the Russian language (without doing the same for other languages to act as a control). Some of them could be Russian corporate bots.
One of their criteria for identifying a bot was a lack of biographical data on their Twitter profiles… I don’t have any biographical data on my Twitter profile (though TBF I don’t meet their other criteria it seems).
I’ve read sloppy academic papers on related topics before. One of them (published in nature!) identified every reference to Oliver Stone’s Ukraine documentary on Twitter as an instance of Russian disinformation.
I fumbled around on their website for a few minutes before giving up for the day. I need to sleep. ↩︎
Everything liberals have accused Russia of doing since like 2016, the Zionist Entity has been doing very openly for decades. Yeah Russia probably has intelligence divisions with spies in the US. There are probably propaganda streams that attempt to influence the American public. However every country on earth with the means does this. Everyone has spies in America.
But the Zionist Entity has AIPAC and every year politicians from both parties go on a stage and swear fealty to Zionism. It’s so open and brazen and no spycraft conspiracies are needed. Zionists do their dirty shit openly, and even when they try to do secret stuff like with Ben-Ami Kadish or Jonathan Pollard, it doesn’t matter. The American empire remains their steadfast ally despite it all.
Like there was an incident in 2019 where the FBI found a bunch of telecommunications interception devices (stingrays) scattered around Washington DC, then told the state department that from forensic analysis it was probably Israel that planted them. The Zionists then blatantly lied referencing some agreement in the 60s that America and Israel wouldn’t spy on one another. And then nothing happened and the most zionist president who ever lived got elected in 2020.
Probably the same amount as most large foreign nations but significantly less than large multinational corporations
Whatever Russia does can’t amount to even a fraction of a percent of the influence the general domestic and international bourgeoisie have over the electoral process to the point that the only reason to even think about it is honestly rooted in xenophobic fear
Russia is interfering with US politics but I don’t think Russia is actually influencing US politics.
The material conditions of neoliberalism lead to the rise of reactionaries and fascism.
The US will create forces like Trump, the alt-right, Steven Miller, Fuentes, with or without Russian money. The seeds were already planted long before Russian involvement.
I’m preaching to the choir here but liberals find it much more comfortable to blame an external entity than reflect on what’s rotten on the inside.
Their RT media house seems to do pretty well trying to hook into nativist currents in the US, I’d give them some credit for US rightist skepticism on Ukraine. Still they’re probably not as effective as Al Jazeera for a comparison.
I don’t think they do too much beyond public-opinion targeting-media and bots (which idk, is that “Russiagate”, I thought there was some element of supposed criminality?) because of sanctions and surveillance it’s much more work for Russian capital to bribe US officials so I doubt they bother.
I would be amazed if a large number of US “representatives” at the higher levels aren’t being blackmailed or bought off by someone, and it’s probably based on which one works, then they use the other. Maybe some of those reps already have an amount of money that makes them less prone to being bought off, so blackmail needs to be involved, or the blackmail isn’t needed if money works, but after a certain point, I don’t think there are many upper-level people in any major government who aren’t being influenced by other countries or oligarchs in one way or another, and to an extent, it doesn’t seem to matter. The US does it, Britain does it, surely Russia does it, China does it, and it’s done to them.
It reminds me of MK-ULTRA because the program was started because of the assumption that other countries were also going to try mind-control programs. After years of the US trying to develop mind control of its own, they realized that other countries had a much easier system where they just bought people off, and that had a much better rate of success because people just wanted to be comfortable. After MK-ULTRA was scrapped, buying off assets was the next best (and real) thing to a more standardized extent.
as a Russian agent in the U.S. I can tell you we lowkeyniunely just sit on our asses and get paid to do nothing, every once in a while they send us a congratulations on our last operation that we had no relations to and we wave and smile.
lowkeyniunely
Bombokhalas
The plots that have surfaced have basically been funding weird basically irrelevant fractious groups of ‘leftwing’ cultists like Black Hammer, and random rw influencers.
I would assume that their media presence is much higher for countries that have Russian speakers.
Mostly just soft influencing, social media campaigns, some money laundering to fund political organizations they think fit their goals. However, I don’t think they’re doing it to a level that’s more than typical for a country with their level of resources. Which is to say, there’s a lot of countries influencing American politics and many of them are doing it more successfully than Russia.
Duh, they’d be stupid not to?
I think the Trump = Russian agent stuff is BS tho,
Somewhat ig. Although nowhere near what the US did to Russia in 1996 as libs claim.
