Key takeaway from Mueller's Indictments

[Va Lefty]

From New Yorker--"At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential, embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read. The willingness to believe purported news stories, often riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics. Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe."

I would add it is also a failure of our education system which often fails to teach "critical thinking" to students.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/reading-the-mueller-indictment-a-russian-american-fraud

[mucifer]

1. except that United States government has done this to other nations in the past.

People can be easily duped.

[Va Lefty]

11. Oh no doubt

The CIA elevated this kind of shit to a science following WWII

[GusBob]

2. People are stupid, gosh who knew?

We have a President who posts things like "we are hear for you" or "heel" when he really needs to mean "heal" (I think he did that one 3 separate times, that's pure fucking stupidity, not a typo)
I'm just a dumb hick that just fell off the turnip truck, but as far as lack of critical thinking, it's everywhere

[Thekaspervote]

8. Agree!! Stupid stupid people!!! They just dont want to be informed ...might involve

Some efffort... lazy!!

[Wounded Bear]

15. People are smart...

[handmade34]

3. my takeaway as well

lack of critical thinking skills and lack of empathy... we have allowed ourselves to be divided into tribes and that is embarrassing

[RKP5637]

4. Yep, basically America is a nation of tribes generally warring verbally. n/t

[RKP5637]

5. This ... "a failure of our education system which often fails to teach

"critical thinking" to students."

[dlk]

6. Schools Are No Longer Teaching Cursive Writing

Soon, Americans won't be able to read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. What then?

[Codeine]

9. Its extremely disturbing that never in our history

has anyone ever produced typewritten copies of those documents.

Oh, wait. . .

[tavernier]

10. Doesnt that just blow your mind?

Next will be math. Who needs it when we have computers?

[Grammy23]

7. Many who fell for the phony emails and participated in the rallies

WANTED to believe the fake quotes and false accusations against Hillary Clinton. They never liked her and were eager to hear stories that confirmed their opinions. So they were ripe for picking. Just toss out a phony charge against her or a obviously fake quote and they were in.

The conspirators were clever in the bait they used to lure followers. Appealing to their target’s prejudices, they also used a folksy, familiar language to sound like an ordinary citizen who held similar opinions about Clinton. The gullible took the posts at face value and fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Once this information gets out to the public, I suspect some of these yahoos are going to get the shock of their lives to find out they were taken in by Russian operatives.

Then again, given their gullibility, they will probably let Fox News tell them that the CONSPIRACY is what is fake. Even when the evidence is presented of what they did and how they did it. They will have to believe Fox in order to save face.

One final thought: When is FOX NEWS going to be revealed as part of the conspiracy? When will Sean Hannity be unmasked as one of the recruits pulled into the conspiracy?

[genxlib]

12. This is the fundamental problem underlying all of this shit

And it is what makes me depressed about our future.

Even if we keep the Russians honest in the future, the tools of our own destruction have been laid out there for anyone to use. Do we really believe that homegrown assholes like Okeefe won't step in and pull all the same strings. Hell, some of the people doing this to us didn't even have political motives. They were just doing it for profit because we were so eager to share bullshit that it was an easy driver for eyeballs and clicks.

But I think it is really more complex than this. I think the real impacts are not the direct ones but the indirect, secondary impacts. Let's face it, the consumers and distributors of the bullshit are partisan and their voting patterns are fixed.

The real problem to me is that the avalanche of BS affects broader general attitudes about a party and candidate. It creates a wide stench of distrust that starts to infect everyone else. That is when you start to get independents and even liberals getting turned off from someone like Hillary to the point of thinking Trump is a viable option.

So often I heard people offer such vague negative thoughts that it became clear to me. People were dissatisfied with the caricature vision of Hillary more than the real Hillary.

Therein lies the real problem.

[CentralMass]

13. What percentage of Democratic voters were stupid enough to fall for Russian propaganda?

I do have a rabid Republican cousin that was off the deep end. I signed up for FB around 2015. Basically have family and a few old friends as friends, maybe 25 people. I had to block the cousin because of her rapid anti-Hillary posts.

Were twitter bots effective at at disuading Democratic voters to not vote for Hillary ? While I have a Twitter account, I signed up for when twitter was new for a technical forum I have only used it about a half dozen times.

To fall for this sh.t you have to be easily manipulated, stupid, or wired like my rabid republican cousin.

I find it hard to belive that these pivotal rust belt voters where this election was lost were all FB and Twitter zombies. They had Fux News and Limbaugh to poison their minds.

[Merlot]

14. Yes, failure of the education system. The one the repubs are defunding

repubs don't like an educated electorate.

[RandomAccess]

16. Sorry, that's a tad simplistic

First and possibly foremost, a very large amount of what the Russians did was just echo our own sentiments, and amplify them all over the place on Twitter and Facebook. Thousands and thousands of Russian bots made their tweets gain ascendancy and prominence (and often their own hashtags!) within hours sometimes. And not just about the campaign, but about all kinds of stuff of importance to BOTH sides, tho especially Trump supporters (such as anti-Black Lives Matter messages). This has nothing to do with credibility of news stories. This is about opinions (our OWN opinions, on both sides) being made larger and more important thanks to amplification.


As for the ability to assess the credibility of what we read:

I consider myself a fairly sophisticated consumer of online news and information -- and social media.

And yet, *I* was astounded at the sophistication, craft and creativity of some of what I saw on social media.

Now, Pizzagate? Yeah. People should have known, but we all know that the Fox News and Fox News only audience have been conditioned (brainwashed) to accept some pretty wild stuff -- outright, bald faced lies --
as real.

I remember one article that got posted on FB by a friend. It didn't sound right so I went to the site that posted the article and had a look around. Checking the headlines of other stories, nothing seemed terribly amiss but I think I finally found one article that seemed propagandish (to coin a word), a little anti-Hillary slanted. But it still wasn't enough.

And mind you, the site itself, with a magazine-style layout, looked authentic. I finally decided to Google for that story to see if I could find out more about its provenance. Oh boy! Yes indeed, that's where the truth lay: every other place it appeared was clearly a rightwing propaganda site and some were quite vile.

While that alone didn't PROVE it originated from a rabid rightwing source, it did prove that the rightwing blogosphere was tuned in to wherever it did originate from and that would hardly have included sites like TPM, DailyKos or even HuffingtonPost or the NYT.

None of this was hard to do, but it was time-consuming and few people would want to take the time, esp. someone who was already predisposed to dislike Clinton anyway. Few people even go to the trouble of consulting the linked site itself.

That was just one example. There were a number of others that were much easier to scope out but not everyone has been taught how to do it or even that there was a need for it.