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| Government |
| FBI's Russian-influence probe includes a look at far-right news sites |
| 2017-03-21 |
| [McClatchy] Washington - Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories -- some fictional -- that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say. Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as "bots," to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said. The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections. Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook. The investigation of the bot-engineered traffic, which appears to be in its early stages, is being driven by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, whose inquiries rarely result in criminal charges and whose main task has been to reconstruct the nature of the Kremlin’s cyber attack and determine ways to prevent another. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #10 The McClatchy article by AP writer Gerald Herbert reads like he came up with the conclusion first and then wrote the story to support the conclusion. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2017-03-21 16:15 |
| #9 91% of media coverage of Trump was negative yet he still won. That shows just how bad a candidate Hillary was. It shows me how irrelevant the media is. |
| Posted by: regular joe 2017-03-21 13:50 |
| #8 Who was paying those trolls? Some of them were doing it gratis. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-03-21 13:08 |
| #7 Who was paying those trolls? |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-03-21 12:19 |
| #6 Sounds like projection to me. Anybody remember the pathetic trolls who kept coming to Rantburg trying to convince us all how bad Trump is? |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-03-21 12:12 |
| #5 Are they investigating the blitz of misleading stories about Hillary pushed by the mindless robots in the press? The admitted rigging of the Democrat primaries? The clear election fraud in Detroit? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2017-03-21 12:10 |
| #4 91% of media coverage of Trump was negative yet he still won. That shows just how bad a candidate Hillary was. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2017-03-21 11:30 |
| #3 blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories I guess I missed it. Anybody else catch it? But all the lefties don't need to see it to believe it - they just know it's true! |
| Posted by: Bobby 2017-03-21 07:42 |
| #2 Federal cyber war investigators following the IRS lead are they ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-03-21 05:39 |
| #1 So, it's a done deal then? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-03-21 03:30 |