Peng Kuan Chin pulled out his phone, eager to show the future of online manipulation.
Unseen servers began crawling the web for Chinese articles and posts. The system quickly reorganized the words and sentences into new text. His screen displayed a rapidly increasing tally of the articles generated by his product, which he dubs the “Content Farm Automatic Collection System." ADVERTISEMENT
With the articles in hand, a set of websites that Peng controlled published them, and his thousands of fake social media accounts spread them across the internet, instantly sending manipulated content into news feeds, messaging app inboxes, and search results.
"I developed this for manipulating public opinion,” Peng told the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with BuzzFeed News for this article. He added that automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”
More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.
Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports.
They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller's role in the Trump administration's failed push for a census citizenship question.
Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month.
Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
From the department of don’t poke the bear 🐻 in the the eye 👀…
I am thinking maybe I should gas up my truck ⛽ tonight when I go out and wash it and buy groceries. 🏪 While the experts see gas prices actually trending lower, we know the president hasn’t been on his best behavior in the Middle East lately. That’s what you get when you elect a professional con artist to the White House.
On January 21, 2010 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed a crowd at the Newseum in Washington, DC. She was there to proclaim the power and importance of “internet freedom.” In the previous few years, she said, online tools had enabled people all around the world to organize blood drives, plan demonstrations, and even mobilize in mass demonstrations for democracy. “A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity,” she declared, and the US would do its part to help promote “a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits us all.”
Clinton’s speech acknowledged that the internet could also be a darker instrument—that its power might be hacked to evil ends, used for spewing hatred or the crushing of dissent. But her thesis rested on the clear beliefs of techno-fundamentalism: that digital technologies necessarily tend toward freedom of association and speech, and that the US-based companies behind the platforms would promote American values. Democracy would spread. Borders would open. Minds would open.
Wouldn’t that have been nice? Ten years later, Clinton is a private citizen, denied the highest office she would seek by a political amateur who leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to drive enthusiasm for his nativist, protectionist, and racist agenda. Oh, and the Newseum is closing down as well. Back in 2010, Clinton had called that institution “a monument to some of our most precious freedoms.” Now it too appears to be a relic of a bygone optimism.
I like the Elizabeth Warren and dysfunction(IMPEACH HER!) for president …. 🏛
Of all the leading Democratic candidates for President, I think Elizabeth Warren is my favorite. Not because I agree with everything she says — she has a plan for it — and some of them are idiotic, but others are quite smart. I really like the idea of having a women for President and somebody whose not been around Washington for life and is somewhat younger then the current incumbent. ✊🏼 I voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein in 2016, and I think it’s time for a change from our current incumbent.👴🏼
I think she could be a strong representative, a voice for the people against the wealthy special interests, especially those who abuse people financially. She also strikes me as independent from the far left, 🤛🏼 willing to push back and push our country towards a more moderate and populist path forward. I think she could be a modestly honest broker, something that can’t be said about the current incumbent who has built his whole career on scams and reckless gambling. 🎰
We really need an honest broker, for the challenges of the presidency and country in the 2020s will be real. At some point soon, there will be a recession, and a steady hand will be needed to lift the country out. 💸 Climate change, while mostly a political football 🏈 used to bash the other party and give partisans something to masturbate about, at some point will come real, probably within the next decade. Expert warnings can be ignored for only so long before the damage sets in. 🚭 Who do you want to be running the country when a hundred billion dollar natural disaster occurs in multiple parts of country? When climate change comes to roost, it’s going to require a war-like response this late in the game. 🌎 Climate change is going to be bad, and it’s coming soon. A war leader facing a major crisis shouldn’t be a professional con-artist like the incumbent.
But we also need an accountable president. It’s congress’ job to act like a brake to the overreach of the presidency, and keep the president an honest broker — regardless of party. I sure hope the next Congress that serves with Elizabeth Warren aggressively investigates her and keeps her accountable. 🤹 Just because something is green energy, doesn’t mean it should be a way for the president and friends to enrich themselves personally. The madam president’s initiatives should be scrutinized and bad ones rejected. Congress should not be afraid to reject radical plans to lock up public lands as wilderness 🔒🌲 or infringe on our second amendment rights.🐇🦌🔫 Diversity is a strength, and grid lock is away to protect it.
“Iran's response will likely be a combination of direct and indirect responses aimed at targeting U.S. military infrastructure and even personnel,” Sanam Vakil, a senior research fellow at London-based think tanks Chatham House, told VICE News. “Iraq is the most likely area where Iran can and will strike first, but the U.S. should not rule out strikes in the Persian Gulf.”
