Russian trolls are among us. Look at the Daily Kos member directly to your left. Now, look at the Daily Kos member directly to your right. One of you is a Russian troll. You know which one of you it is!
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Kos where the rest of us live, we’re busy pushing fake news and posting it to Facebook.
Exhibit A from a few days ago:
Hundreds of Trump Organization secret subdomains are hosted in Russia
The diary, that spent more than 24 hours on the Rec list and garnered 430 recs and nearly 2,500 Facebook shares, breathlessly revealed details of Trump subdomains that traced back to servers in St. Petersburg, Russia. The diary relied on tweets and information from unhackthevote.com, an oft-discredited site that has peddled numerous idiotic and inane conspiracy theories over the years on a par with Infowars.
Yet the diarist described unhackthevote thusly:
You may not be familiar with unhackthevote.com, but they’ve been on the front lines of the cyber war against hacking of our voting machines.
No. Wrong. They’ve been on the front lines of spreading stupid, unfounded and inane speculation and conspiracy theories about hacked voting for years. They’re fucking idiots.
The diarist, based on the inane and false bullshit spread by unhackthevote, implied and suggested that these subdomains provide proof that Trump servers were “in communication with computers in Russia!”
Numerous informed commenters in the diary told the diarist that his diary was false and based on unfounded, speculative bullshit. Yet people kept reccing it and sharing it on Twitter and Facebook as if it were fact.
As many computer experts pointed out in the comments, the more logical explanation for these Trump subdomains pointing back to servers in Russia is that these Trump organization owned domains had been hacked by Russian hackers through the registration site, GoDaddy.
Lo and behold, a story from AP today:
AP finds hackers hijacked at least 195 Trump web addresses
Four years ago, well before the furor over allegations Moscow meddled in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House, at least 195 web addresses belonging to Trump, his family or his business empire were hijacked by hackers possibly operating out of Russia, The Associated Press has learned.
…
After the hack, computer users who visited the Trump-related addresses were unwittingly redirected to servers in St. Petersburg, Russia, that cybersecurity experts said contained malicious software commonly used to steal passwords or hold files for ransom. Whether anyone fell victim to such tactics is unclear.
...
According to security experts, the hackers hijacked the addresses by penetrating and altering the domain registration records housed at GoDaddy.com, a seller of web addresses.
According to the story, the hacking occurred in 2013.
I know we’re all anxious to find (yet another) smoking gun linking Trump to Russia, but vetting sources is essential to avoid becoming just another source of fake news.
I’ve written a number of diaries pointing out the problems with promoting the likes of conspiracy theorists Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor, Palmer Report, Scott Dworkin and Seth Abramson. Just because they’re saying things we want to be true, doesn’t mean the self-aggrandizing bullshit they’re peddling is true. unhackthevote fits right in with that crowd.
Sure, Russian trolls may be a problem, but having folks here check sources, listen to those among us with expertise and not rec up fake news is something we all can do. Right now.
