RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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choc_cardigan
Squad
They are coming for Kushner. Maybe the play is to get to Ivanka and use her to squeeze Trump 
Facebook Estimates 10 Million Users Saw Russian-Backed Ads
Social-media giant warns it may not yet have uncovered all malicious activity related to election
Natalie Andrews
Updated Oct. 2, 2017 8:06 p.m. ET
A sign near Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Photo: Associated Press
Facebook Inc. on Monday said it estimates 10 million people saw ads it has discovered on its platform paid for by Russian entities, but warned that it may not have uncovered all malicious activity that attempted to interfere in the American political process.
The revelation from Facebook quantifies for the first time the spread of the known Russian activity since the social network said last month it had identified 470 “inauthentic” Russian-backed accounts responsible for $100,000 in advertising spending. Facebook on Monday presented congressional investigators with data on 3,000 ads bought by the Russian actors before and after the U.S. presidential election.
About half of the ads were seen after the election, Facebook said, and one quarter were never shown to anyone. Half of the ads cost less than $3 to run.
“We hope that by cooperating with Congress, the special counsel and our industry partners, we will help keep bad actors off our platform,” Facebook said in a statement Monday.
“What should alarm the American people is the brazen exploitation and distortion of popular opinion by a hostile foreign power, amounting to really an attack on our democracy, to disrupt our election by surreptitiously targeting voters in certain places with certain backgrounds and views,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday. He added that he viewed some of the ads that were provided to select members of Congress on Monday.
House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Adam Schiff (D-CA) Photo: jim bourg/Reuters
The accounts behind the 5,200 Russian-backed ads represented both sides of the political spectrum, and attempted to drive clicks and follows. “Secured Borders,” for example, often railed against illegal immigration, while “Blacktivist” was more aligned with the Black Lives Matters movement. A source with knowledge of the pages confirmed their authenticity.
Facebook’s announcement about the reach of the Russian ads indicates that online information giants may still be in the early stages of uncovering the extent of hidden influence on its platform. Twitter Inc., for example, cross-checked Facebook’s list of 470 Russian-backed accounts to determine if there was Russian-backed activity on the short-messaging platform. That approach drew fire from lawmakers, who said Twitter’s investigation was inadequate. Google, part of Alphabet Inc., is conducting its own extensive internal investigation.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Monday that ads from Facebook and and Twitter are likely “the smallest concentric circle of Russian activity and there could very well be a lot more.”
“What Facebook has found thus far have been ads that were funded by money that could be directly tracked back to Russia,” Mr. Schiff (D., Calif.) said. “And I think probably with respect to a certain group operating in Russia. So to the degree Russians funneled money through third countries, that is a whole category that we don’t have an answer to yet.”
Facebook’s admission last month of Russian activity came after it said over the summer it had found no such activity. On Monday, it left the door open to the discovery of more ads. “We’re still looking for abuse and bad actors,” Facebook’s Vice President of Policy and Communications Elliot Schrage said in a statement. “Our internal investigation continues.”
Russia has denied interfering in the election.
Facebook’s estimate of the audience for the Russian ads is lower than some experts anticipated. Joel Yakuel, founder and chief executive of New York-based digital ad firm Agency Within, had said the Russian ads could have reached as many as 20 million or more people on the social network.
Facebook said the ads ran between 2015 and May of this year. One percent of the ads cost $1,000 or more, Facebook said.
Depending on how they are presented, ads on provocative topics, such as the ones the Russian actors purchased, can have a wide reach at a low cost if the messages go viral or gain traction among their target audience, according to ad buyers. In particular, getting a lot of shares appears to drive down the cost, ad buyers have said. This could explain why the Russian actors paid so little for some of the ads.
Facebook said some of the ads were paid for in Russian currency. Mr. Schrage defended Facebook for not identifying the ads based on currency, “because the overwhelming majority of advertisers who pay in Russian currency, like the overwhelming majority of people who access Facebook from Russia, aren’t doing anything wrong.”
Mr. Blumenthal noted that the ads “don’t advocate for a candidate, and yet they do” because the ads mention hot-topic issues that divide people politically, such as gay marriage or immigration. He called for the ads to be made public.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at Natalie.Andrews@wsj.com
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.
Again, the span of time we're dealing with more and more bullshyt is so insane.They are coming for Kushner. Maybe the play is to get to Ivanka and use her to squeeze Trump
We literally had to deal with him revising his SF-86
THREE times.
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
The important point to keep in mind with the third undisclosed email address is that it has been in use as well as government issued devices before J-Kush or Ivanka officially became WH staff.
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Facebook Estimates 10 Million Users Saw Russian-Backed Ads
Social-media giant warns it may not yet have uncovered all malicious activity related to election
Natalie Andrews
Updated Oct. 2, 2017 8:06 p.m. ET
A sign near Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Photo: Associated Press
Facebook Inc. on Monday said it estimates 10 million people saw ads it has discovered on its platform paid for by Russian entities, but warned that it may not have uncovered all malicious activity that attempted to interfere in the American political process.
The revelation from Facebook quantifies for the first time the spread of the known Russian activity since the social network said last month it had identified 470 “inauthentic” Russian-backed accounts responsible for $100,000 in advertising spending. Facebook on Monday presented congressional investigators with data on 3,000 ads bought by the Russian actors before and after the U.S. presidential election.
About half of the ads were seen after the election, Facebook said, and one quarter were never shown to anyone. Half of the ads cost less than $3 to run.
“We hope that by cooperating with Congress, the special counsel and our industry partners, we will help keep bad actors off our platform,” Facebook said in a statement Monday.
“What should alarm the American people is the brazen exploitation and distortion of popular opinion by a hostile foreign power, amounting to really an attack on our democracy, to disrupt our election by surreptitiously targeting voters in certain places with certain backgrounds and views,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday. He added that he viewed some of the ads that were provided to select members of Congress on Monday.
House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Adam Schiff (D-CA) Photo: jim bourg/Reuters
The accounts behind the 5,200 Russian-backed ads represented both sides of the political spectrum, and attempted to drive clicks and follows. “Secured Borders,” for example, often railed against illegal immigration, while “Blacktivist” was more aligned with the Black Lives Matters movement. A source with knowledge of the pages confirmed their authenticity.
Facebook’s announcement about the reach of the Russian ads indicates that online information giants may still be in the early stages of uncovering the extent of hidden influence on its platform. Twitter Inc., for example, cross-checked Facebook’s list of 470 Russian-backed accounts to determine if there was Russian-backed activity on the short-messaging platform. That approach drew fire from lawmakers, who said Twitter’s investigation was inadequate. Google, part of Alphabet Inc., is conducting its own extensive internal investigation.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Monday that ads from Facebook and and Twitter are likely “the smallest concentric circle of Russian activity and there could very well be a lot more.”
“What Facebook has found thus far have been ads that were funded by money that could be directly tracked back to Russia,” Mr. Schiff (D., Calif.) said. “And I think probably with respect to a certain group operating in Russia. So to the degree Russians funneled money through third countries, that is a whole category that we don’t have an answer to yet.”
Facebook’s admission last month of Russian activity came after it said over the summer it had found no such activity. On Monday, it left the door open to the discovery of more ads. “We’re still looking for abuse and bad actors,” Facebook’s Vice President of Policy and Communications Elliot Schrage said in a statement. “Our internal investigation continues.”
Russia has denied interfering in the election.
Facebook’s estimate of the audience for the Russian ads is lower than some experts anticipated. Joel Yakuel, founder and chief executive of New York-based digital ad firm Agency Within, had said the Russian ads could have reached as many as 20 million or more people on the social network.
Facebook said the ads ran between 2015 and May of this year. One percent of the ads cost $1,000 or more, Facebook said.
Depending on how they are presented, ads on provocative topics, such as the ones the Russian actors purchased, can have a wide reach at a low cost if the messages go viral or gain traction among their target audience, according to ad buyers. In particular, getting a lot of shares appears to drive down the cost, ad buyers have said. This could explain why the Russian actors paid so little for some of the ads.
Facebook said some of the ads were paid for in Russian currency. Mr. Schrage defended Facebook for not identifying the ads based on currency, “because the overwhelming majority of advertisers who pay in Russian currency, like the overwhelming majority of people who access Facebook from Russia, aren’t doing anything wrong.”
Mr. Blumenthal noted that the ads “don’t advocate for a candidate, and yet they do” because the ads mention hot-topic issues that divide people politically, such as gay marriage or immigration. He called for the ads to be made public.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at Natalie.Andrews@wsj.com
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.
those patriotic conservatives falling for russian adsBruh, its definitely not just conservatives.
You had so-called "liberals" shytting on Hillary during the election over complete bullshyt stories with her non-story email scandal. And you still got Bernie-Bros out here as well as Jill Stein fans.
The far left was just as gullible.
Yeah but liberals still voted Hillary in droves
Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters
Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters
SAN FRANCISCO —
Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.
The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.
The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.
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People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.
One such ad featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber — the people familiar with the investigation said.
[Russian Facebook ads showed a black woman firing a rifle, amid efforts to stoke racial strife]
Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.
Another showed an image of Democrat Hillary Clinton behind what appeared to be prison bars.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Russia’s exploitation of the Custom Audiences system. Facebook officials have previously said that they were caught off guard by the Russian propaganda campaign because the accounts, pages and ads appeared to be legitimate.
In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target.
The conclusions of investigators fit those of several independent researchers, who say that the Russian disinformation campaign exploited the core advertising and tracking technologies that Silicon Valley has honed over a decade to serve corporate America — and that are widely available, with few if any restrictions, to political actors in the United States and abroad.
“These are the same methods and sophisticated tools that the pharmaceutical companies were using, that big oil companies were using,” said Philip N. Howard of Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project. “This was regular ad technology that regular advertisers use.”
The revelation about the use of Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, which has not been previously reported, adds to an emerging picture of a Russian effort to shape the U.S. election and sow division using tools built by American technology companies.
And it makes clear that Russians used Facebook to direct their influence campaigns to voters whom they had already tracked and to find new ones wherever they browsed the Internet — even if they used multiple devices such as a smartphone for work or a tablet at home.
[Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook]
Targeted people might also have directed that same disinformation — whether intentionally or not — to people linked to them on social networks, such as their friends on Facebook.
“This means that any American who knowingly or unknowingly clicked on a Russian news site may have been targeted through Facebook’s advertising systems to become an agent of influence — a potentially sympathetic American who could spread Russian propaganda with other Americans,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Every successful click gives them more data that they can use to retarget. It feeds on itself and it speeds up the influence dramatically.”
Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who has studied the links among fake news, Russian propaganda sites and their relationship to Facebook and other social media platforms, said that hundreds of Russian sites were loaded up with ad tracking software, known as cookies, that would allow them to follow any visitor across the Web and onto Facebook.
The Custom Audiences tool enabled Russian advertisers to feed information from those cookies, which are long strings of numbers that advertisers collect, into Facebook’s systems, which could match them with the accounts of particular Facebook users.
The Facebook users were then shown ads featuring divisive topics that the Russians wanted to promote in their Facebook news feeds, which displayed the ads alongside messages from friends and family members.
As targeted users clicked on the Facebook ads, the system would eventually take them to Web pages outside Facebook, where they would be tracked with more-aggressive forms of tracking software, Albright said.
“A lot of this content is simply for tracking,” Albright said. “You need to get people out of the social networks, off the platforms, because that’s the place where you can attach the advanced ad technology.”
Facebook delivered more than 3,000 ads to congressional investigators on Monday. It is also sharing information on which users those ads were designed to target, how many users viewed or clicked on those ads, and the payment methods used by the Russians.
The company said Monday that modeling shows that these ads were seen by roughly 10 million users. An estimated 44 percent were seen before the Nov. 8 election, and the rest were seen afterward.
Twitter disclosed on Thursday that it had shut down an additional 201 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, and it said that three accounts connected with the Kremlin-linked news site RT had spent $274,000 on its platform in 2016. Google said last month that the company had not found evidence of Russian meddling and is conducting an internal investigation into the issue.
The revelations come at a moment when investigators are widening their probe into how Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology platforms to widen fissures in the United States and spread disinformation during election season. Those companies have come under increasing pressure from Capitol Hill to investigate Russian meddling and are facing the possibility of new regulations that could affect their massive advertising businesses.
“There’s been some thought that the Internet was a goose laying golden eggs, but now there’s a sense that all the eggs are not golden,” said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Political experts have pointed out that during close elections such as the 2016 presidential contest, a small number of votes by people living in certain states can have a disproportionate influence on the outcome. Without a full accounting of where ads were targeted on the Web and who was targeted — as well as how many times those ads were shared within social networks — it is difficult to assess the impact of the Russian influence campaign.
Facebook introduced Custom Audiences in mid-2012, in the middle of the presidential election contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Advertisers hailed the tool as a major innovation because it enabled them to know the interests of individuals. People who signal interest in a subject by clicking on a link are also considered more impressionable when they are repeatedly targeted by ads.
Custom Audiences also allowed a business to know when consumers had viewed a particular pair of shoes on a website so that they could be repeatedly shown an ad for those shoes on Facebook and elsewhere online. As consumers spent more time on social media, the tool became a driver of Facebook’s ad business — and of the company’s sevenfold increase in value since its initial public offering in 2012.
Timberg and Entous reported from Washington
@DonKnock @SJUGrad13 @88m3 @Menelik II @wire28 @smitty22 @Reality @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @THE MACHINE @OneManGang @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @blotter @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @Grano-Grano @.r.
Three times. Three times. Three times.
Just saying it is exhausting, yet the excuses keep being accepted. When does it stop being an innocent mistake?
5?
10?
100?
GnauzBookOfRhymes
Superstar
Full text: Homeland security adviser's update on Puerto Rico
It's just about optics for these a$$holes.... Hurry Up Mueller...
People in PR dying, he admits only 45% of people have drinking water and there is 1 functioning hospital, and he is plannng themes on the good job they are doing.
Disgusting.
It's just about optics for these a$$holes...
. Hurry Up Mueller...People in PR dying, he admits only 45% of people have drinking water and there is 1 functioning hospital, and he is plannng themes on the good job they are doing.
Disgusting.