{"id":19999,"date":"2018-02-28T16:24:53","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T21:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=19999"},"modified":"2018-02-28T16:24:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T21:24:53","slug":"politics-as-usual-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/politics-as-usual-12\/","title":{"rendered":"POLITICS AS USUAL"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mainstream media, fringe media and the tinfoil-hat wearing brigade of the blogosphere all play a significant part in how the public\u2019s attitudes towards business, politics and people are shaped.
\nRightly or wrongly, that is the reality. Bots that \u201ctroll\u201d are a thing. A pretty big \u201cthing\u201d as it turns out. The US Attorney General (AG) released a report stating what most of us already saw as obvious. A foreign entity, in this case Russia, waged an info war on various US institutions using all forms of media \u2013 but in particular by weaponizing troll bots and troll farms (because that\u2019s a \u201cthing\u201d too apparently) \u2013 for the purposes of impacting the US election.
\nBefore anyone sends me yet another flaming email about Trump, I am not saying that said well documented info-war actually handed Trump the election, so calm down please. What I am saying is that there is unquestionable evidence that there was a state sponsored program to interfere with the democratic process writ large.
\nBased on the US AG\u2019s report, Russian agents flooded social media with misinformation, often releasing simultaneously contradictory information, to sow discord and discontent; to force people to question the very existence of object truth. And they were \u2013 and are \u2013 very successful.
\nThat\u2019s a game-changer. And it\u2019s quite simply terrifying.
\nThis was no mere angry little man in a basement somewhere, eating Cheetohs and firing off rambling, angry missives on Facebook or twitter. I dare say every community has its share of those kinds of folks. And every politician or public person everywhere has to deal with that kind of nonsense. Most recognize quickly that the tinfoil hat brigade are chattering to themselves and are best simply ignored.
\nThis was something entirely different.
\nThis was an organized, highly structured disinformation campaign.
\nAnd it doesn\u2019t appear that it\u2019s going to end anytime soon or that it\u2019s limited to the US. It is a tactic that is being widely used by a host of different actors across the globe on stages big and small.
\nPeople now have no way of knowing whether their supposedly local partisan political chat group has any affiliation at all with the views being pushed out. What is true? What is false? Who knows?
\nI think there is universal concern about how fast and insidiously misinformation is spread today. But identifying the threat is one thing. What to do about it? Well that\u2019s an entirely different terrifying concern.
\nHow do you police the internet? How do you balance the right of folks to say what they want, to read what they want, to believe what they want with the need to ensure that the \u201cfacts\u201d that inform those beliefs, those opinions are in fact, well, facts? And who will determine what is a fact? And is that even possible?
\nMy head starts to hurt the more I think about it. It seems like an intractable issue.
\nThe internet has so many positives. It has democratized access to one of the most valuable commodities there is \u2013 information. It\u2019s frightening to think that it may have been all a fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas Mainstream media, fringe media and the tinfoil-hat wearing brigade of the blogosphere all play a significant part in how the public\u2019s attitudes towards business, politics and people are shaped. Rightly or wrongly, that is the reality. Bots that \u201ctroll\u201d are a thing. A pretty big \u201cthing\u201d as it turns out. The US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5cz","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-16 01:25:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}