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2020 Presidential election

This is, without any doubt, the most horrifying article I’ve ever read on this topic. @Red @Zombie @fishonjazz @Gameface @colton What do y’all think?



Facebook Disinformation
After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
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Micro targeting:

Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S.
Texting:
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Texting:
Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.
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and this is just terrifying. What the worst people can do with such great power. My goodness. Working together to destroy lives and discredit reporters critical of Trump

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”
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upcoming war on local press:

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by ThePalm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”
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The Thriller said:
This is, without any doubt, the most horrifying article I’ve ever read on this topic. @Red @Zombie @fishonjazz @Gameface @colton What do y’all think?
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Well, I looked closely at Cambridge Analytica/Mercer, and Parscale a few years ago. Fundamental to what the article describes is efforts that can only damage our democracy, and have already done do, and will continue to do so. Trump will be a formidable candidate for reelection. I believe he will be very difficult to beat, and the tactics described here are a huge reason why. An authoritarian harnessing techniques used to develop whatever alternative reality best suits his goal of maintaining power. What is frustrating to me has been the inability of Trump supporters to understand how damaging creating false "realities" will be if we expect the electorate to make decisions based on facts and truth.

Trump is simply very Orwellian. Create the Big Lie and use it to control the way people vote. Negative ads are one thing, they all use them, and they all mislead to some degree. What Trump and company are up to is a whole other level of manipulating and shaping what people believe is "real". People who don't recognize how damaging that is are people who have yet to clearly see what Trump has represented right from the start, the creation of an authoritarian Chief Executive who can act with impunity and eliminate any accountability.
 
So I just went back and looked a little and @silesian you never did support the plan so I apologize. What you did do is come in randomly and start dissing Trump(quoting me) when we were talking about Warren's plan. So that's where my confusion came from. I can't tell you how to do anything but if you were fiscal I would think that you would've had my back on that absolutely ludicrous conversation instead of turn it into a Trump hating every...single...second...of...every....single...day....thing(sigh). Just saying. Is it that you can't let go of your judgementalism of a person who doesn't absolutely hate Trump? Thing is... I never see you talk any **** or rebut any of the crazy spending policies others here have talked about. It's always just taking **** on me. My theory is that you know people will start bullying you and look at you differently. Either that or you Mitt Romneys #1 bff.
 
Joe Bagadonuts said:
Warren flies on private jets and then tries to hide that fact by sneaking around in the shadow of her staffers because she's an idiot.
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Lol. Did you watch the video? She isn't sneaking at all.
Consider the source of that tweet. Dude definitely has an agenda (he is clearly a trump fan)

You are falling for fake news.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
 
fishonjazz said:
Lol. Did you watch the video? She isn't sneaking at all.
Consider the source of that tweet. Dude definitely has an agenda (he is clearly a trump fan)

You are falling for fake news.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
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Yes I did watch it and she absolutely is sneaking. And no wonder she is because flying on a private jet runs completely contrary to her stated position on the environment.
 
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Joe Bagadonuts said:
Yes I did watch it and she absolutely is sneaking. And no wonder she is because flying on a private jet runs completely contrary to her stated position on the environment.
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She isn't sneaking. The people in front of her get off way ahead of her and start walking and she just walks a ways behind them.
If she was sneaking they would have came out of the plane together in a tight cluster and remained that way throughout the walk.

Man, you really fall for your parties agenda hard lol.

To you a person walking behind (with a large gap between) another person equals sneaking lol. According to your standards of sneaking we all are sneaking whenever we are behind another human.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
 
fishonjazz said:
She isn't sneaking. The people in front of her get off way ahead of her and start walking and she just walks a ways behind them.
If she was sneaking they would have came out of the plane together in a tight cluster and remained that way throughout the walk.

Man, you really fall for your parties agenda hard lol.

To you a person walking behind (with a large gap between) another person equals sneaking lol. According to your standards of sneaking we all are sneaking whenever we are behind another human.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6013 using JazzFanz mobile app
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I'm really amazed that you can't see this. She is clearly making an effort to position the staffer between herself and the camera from the moment that she sees it. And even if by some bizarre coincidence she happens to have walked the entire way to the gate in the only position where she could have remained hidden by pure accident, it is clear that flying on a private jet does not mesh with the policies that she wants to implement for the rest of us. But I guess her constituents are fine with that because she is more important than the rest of us.
 
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