Trump says Russia probe a disgrace!

Trump is a puppet? Perhaps. But the fact that voters put him in instead of Hillary will be an under appreciated benefit to the world. No one will know how bad Hillary would have been. Thanks to him winning the globalists have been hurt very very badly - regardless of his imperfections. If Hillary had won, the globalists would have done many more horrid things right away - thinking it was over. Now - they have a fight on their hands.

 ‘Zero collusion’: Trump says Russia probe a disgrace, many ads ‘bad’ for him
RT : 3 Nov, 2017

US President Donald Trump has called the ongoing Congress investigation into alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election “a disgrace.” Trump added that it was a bad thing for the US itself, and lashed out at US ‘fake news’.

Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House had to admit that there is “no collusion,” but continue to look for it nevertheless, Trump said during his interview with Howie Carr at the White House on Thursday.

“In fact, even in all fairness with all of these investigations going on in the Senate and the House — they walk out, even the Democrats — ‘There’s no collusion but we’ll continue to look, there’s smoke, there’s no collusion but there’s — and the Republicans are coming out just saying, ‘There's just no collusion,’” he said.

“And it’s a disgrace that it can go on,” the US leader added when asked about the ongoing probe. “To be honest it’s a disgrace and it’s bad for our country.”

Meanwhile, the real “biggest” collusion is “fake media,” according to Trump, who stressed that CNN, NBC and CBS are doing “dishonest reporting.”

“That really is the collusion, really that is the fake news, that is something [that] set a level nobody has seen before,” Trump said.
Speaking about Facebook findings on Russia-linked ads, Trump said that they were a “strange thing” as “it’s not even ads that pertain to what we’re talking about."

“A lot of the ads, if you look at them and study them, it’s actually bad for me,” the president said adding that there was “zero collusion.”

Facebook, Google, Twitter staff aided both US presidential candidates – study

RT : 27 Oct, 2017

 

Employees of Facebook, Google and Twitter played a large role in developing candidates' messages and targeting voters in the US presidential election, according to a new study, which also said such support was especially vital for the Trump campaign.

The research, conducted by communications professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah, says that tech giants’ employees went beyond their typical roles of "promoting services and facilitating digital advertising buys.
In fact, their efforts included "actively shaping campaign communications through their close collaboration with political staffers," the paper states.
Their tasks specifically included working more as political operatives by suggesting methods to target hard-to-reach voters online and helping to create responses to likely attack methods during debates. They also analyzed candidates' calendars to recommended ad pushes around upcoming speeches.
Researchers noted that Facebook coordinated so-called "dark spot" posts, which would only appear to certain users, and identified the kinds of photos that would perform best on Instagram. Twitter helped candidates analyze the performances of their fundraising tweets and recommended additional moves the campaigns should make. Google, for its part, monitored candidates' travel schedules to recommend geographically targeted advertisements.
The discovery is significant, as it reveals roles which have typically only been entrusted to candidates' own staff members or paid consultants.
"The extent to which they were helping candidates online was a surprise to us," co-author Daniel Kreiss from UNC Chapel Hill told Politico. He referred to the assistance as "a form of subsidy from technology firms to political candidates."
Although such services were offered to all political candidates free of charge, it was found to be most beneficial for Donald Trump's campaign, which did not heavily invest in its own digital operations during the primaries and made significant use of "embedded" Facebook, Google, and Twitter employees in the general election, according to the study.
Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, employees from the three companies set up an office in a strip mall office rented by the Trump campaign in San Antonio, Texas, the researchers wrote, citing former Twitter communications official Nu Wexler. San Antonio is the home of Trump’s digital campaign chief, Brad Parscale.
"One, they found that they were getting solid advice, and two, it's cheaper. It's free labor," Wexler is cited as saying in the study. Tech company employees would work in the San Antonio office for days at a time, and ultimately helped Trump close his staffing gap with Hillary Clinton, according to digital experts interviewed by the researchers.
Clinton opted not to "embed" the tech companies' employees in her campaign, the researchers noted, instead choosing to develop her own digital framework and call in the tech firms to help execute certain elements of her strategy.
“Clinton viewed us as vendors rather than consultants," one unnamed tech company worker is quoted as saying. However, an anonymous source close to the Clinton campaign argued that her team was in regular contact with the tech companies. The source added that there would have simply been no advantage to having such professionals sitting at desks at Clinton's headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.
When the firms were asked specifically about the work they did for Trump, they stressed that their services were available to all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation.
Meanwhile, Kreiss says the study's findings warrant more research into the relationship between Silicon Valley and political campaigns.
"It raises the larger question of what should be the transparency around this, given that it's taking place in the context of a democratic election," he said.
The study, which is due to be published in the journal Political Communication, interviewed more than a dozen people, including tech company employees who worked inside several 2016 presidential campaigns and with campaign officials.

The research comes as Facebook, Google, and Twitter prepare to testify at next week’s congressional hearings on Russia's alleged use of the platforms to interfere with the 2016 election. Russia has repeatedly denied any interference in the election, pointing to a lack of evidence to support those claims. Trump has also referred to the accusations as a "hoax" and a "witch hunt."

‘Russian election posts’ 0.74% & 0.004% of content – Twitter & Facebook reveal size of ‘campaign’

RT : 31 Oct, 2017

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have prepared their testimonies on the alleged 'Russia-linked' election-related posts to US lawmakers. Both appear to say the numbers are under one percent of all election-related posts.

Facebook's written testimony, seen by Reuters and Bloomberg, claims some 80,000 posts related to the US election were published by "Russia-based operatives" over two years.

In the massive flow of Facebook's content, that amounts to one in 23,000 posts, or some 0.004 percent. Regardless, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch called such posts a "new threat" to the social network's "mission of building community and everything we stand for." He said the posts were created by "fake accounts" and are thus "unacceptable."

Falling neatly in line with US lawmakers’ relentless hunt for alleged "Russian interference" in the 2016 US election, Stretch will testify that the posts “opened a new battleground for our company, our industry and our society.” Some 126 million Americans may have seen the offending posts over the two-year period, Stretch claims.

Twitter will meanwhile testify that it has "tracked" 2,752 automated accounts to "Russian operatives," according to an unnamed source familiar with Twitter's prepared testimony, Reuters reports.

This is significantly up from the 201 accounts reported in September. The 1.4 million tweets by the "Russia-linked" automated accounts amount to some 0.74 percent of election coverage on Twitter and under-performed relative to their volume.

It is not clear whether the culpable accounts include Atlanta-based African-American rights activist Charlie Peach, who earlier told RT she was being banned in the "Russian bot" sweep, or any like her.

Facebook and Twitter have caved in to US lawmakers' pressure to find a centralized, Moscow-backed campaign that swayed American voters in the 2016 election, which saw Republic Donald Trump snatch a narrow win from Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Previously, Facebook revealed $100,000 worth of vaguely "Russia-linked" ads related to the election, over half of which it later admitted were posted after the election was over.

Twitter recently banned all ads from RT and Sputnik, citing "election interference." While doing so, however, it conveniently neglected to tell to lawmakers of its own multi-million dollar pitch for RT to buy ads during the election in question.

Twitter's move has prompted a stern rebuke from the Kremlin, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying it “sets a precedent of unequal treatment of its customers.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said retaliatory measures could follow.

Russia has firmly and consistently denied any effort to sway the 2016 US election through social media.

Senior Google, Facebook and Twitter officials are expected to appear as witnesses at the Senate Judiciary Committee's panel on Crime and Terrorism Wednesday. Two more hearings involving Silicon Valley executives are scheduled: at the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

Selected Comments:

# Am I to understand that the American electorate is so fickle that it can be swayed by a few posts? Or that it is so uninformed of its own affairs that it depends on foreign posts to form an opinion on whom to elect? Or could it be that they are indeed informed and chose to change the status quo?

# The time on and taxpayers money being wasted on this when there are more important things to do and bigger fish to fry. As for Twitter & Facebook, typical American behaviour trying to shift the blame onto others to protect themselves.

# It is US who interferes in other countries. There is nothing here to make news on such lies, deceits and blatant bad mouthed campaigns overpowering from US.

# US elites trying to prove that their Idiot Electorate can't be trusted to use the World Wide Web, because information they see there might not be US-approved Propaganda.