From yesterday’s indictment of the Russian troll farm by Special Counsel Robert Mueller:
47. Starting in or around the summer of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators also began to promote allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party through their fictitious U.S. personas and groups on social media. Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased advertisements on Facebook to further promote the allegations.
a. On or about August 4, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators began purchasing advertisements that promoted a post on the ORGANIZATION-controlled Facebook account “Stop A.I.” The post alleged that “Hillary Clinton has already committed voter fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.”
This confirmation that Russians were pushing the election-fraud narrative in summer 2016 reminded me that this narrative kept popping up around here at that time as well. Most of the time it was smacked down relatively quickly by effective community moderation, which is what has kept Daily Kos a place for consistent high-quality discussion.
But there was a glaring exception, one which exposes a major vulnerability of Daily Kos’ system.
On July 29th, 2016, about eight hours after the end of the Democratic National Convention, a diary was posted on Daily Kos making accusations of massive election fraud by Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary. This theory was, and remains, rank CT (if you want to argue about that, please do it elsewhere). Fortunately, in accordance with Daily Kos’ rules of the road banning conspiracy theory and its fantastic community moderation, both Sanders and Clinton supporters (zero pie here, please), responded correctly: the tip jar was flagged. Administration also responded correctly: the diarist was banned. Normally, this would be the end of the story.
However, the diary absolutely took off on Facebook. It reached the “Most Shared” list at Daily Kos and thus appeared on the right side of the screen. As Daily Kos users saw this appear in their Facebook feeds, they trickled back to the diary, dragging the tip jar out of the hidden comments and eventually giving the diary an embarrassing 58 recommendations. In the comment section, you can see the dialogue between appalled community members and the people who came back to recommend.
The scary part is how far this was spread on Facebook. The indicator of Facebook shares reads roughly 10,000 — but this indicator is glitchy. At the height of the storm, as indicated in a Help Desk thread, this story was shared at least 71,000 times on Facebook, translating into views that are likely in the millions. Every one of those views spread disinformation, and every one of them gave the impression that Daily Kos backed this conspiracy theory.
A major caveat: it is difficult to tell whether this diary, and the resulting zombie share-storm, was actually part of the Russian disinformation campaign. As background, the diarist had joined Daily Kos twelve days before and had posted a variety of diaries, some on non-controversial topics, some on more controversial topics such as the WikiLeaks/Russia dump of hacked DNC emails. Each diary consisted of a link, a block quote, and either zero analysis or one line of it. The diarist did engage in the comment sections, at least marginally. So although some of this may seem a bit suspicious, useful idiocy seems as good an explanation as direct Russian trolling, and absent administrative evidence such as IP addresses, it seems unlikely that we will ever know.
However, it is unquestionable that this diary spread disinformation that aligned perfectly with the objectives of a hostile foreign power’s attack on our electoral process. And it did so in the name of Daily Kos.
So I call for site administration to make whatever changes are necessary to close this serious loophole in community moderation. We cannot let this happen again.
Saturday, Feb 17, 2018 · 7:35:36 PM +00:00
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DiesIrae
A fantastic comment by DK user mnkh, which says it better than I did:
My major takeaway from this diary — and I think it is a critical one — is that given what we now know about the current environment, all social media including Daily Kos has an affirmative obligation to undertake proactive strategies that will do everything possible to prevent bad actors from using DK as a means of disseminating propaganda and deceiving the electorate.