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Shaking out the Internet doesnt result in tidy piles of content: some real, some fake; some human, some automated; some sincere, some trolling. The nature of the online world is baked into its name. Its a web of conflicting and conflicted stories, arguments and people that can make identifying how and why something has seized the popular attention often tricky.

Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington, first realized this directly when she was studying the online reaction to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Analyzing a dataset of 600,000 tweets about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, she helped put together a map of how information was shared among those close to the event and more broadly. In addition to tweets about the likely effects of the spill, she noticed an undercurrent of another type of information: misinformation about the most dire possible outcomes often coming from politically focused accounts.

There were these weird claims the ocean floor was going to collapse and there was going to be a tsunami of oil coming ashore, Starbird said when we spoke by phone last week. It was confusing. I remember people were emotionally affected and scared about this, people that lived in the area. One woman who lived in Louisiana even sent Starbird a panicked message asking if that risk was real. It wasnt, of course. But the story was shared within that community as though it might be, including by one Twitter user central to the conversation whose main focus during the spill was using it to be critical of Barack Obama.

After the 2016 election, Starbird revisited that discussion and noticed something resonant.

I went back and tracked some of these articles using the Wayback Machine and they cited Russian scientists, and they went through right-wing blogs that we might call alt-right now, Starbird said, referring to the Internet Archives tool for cataloging the history of websites. At the time, I didnt notice what was going on, but with the benefit of hindsight, you notice that this stuff was happening for a long time.

While Starbird didnt document any direct influence from Russian actors in her analysis, it would not have been the only instance of their behaving in that way. In his analysis of a Russian disinformation agency for the New York Times in 2015, journalist Adrian Chen documented an incident from 2014 in which Russians actively spread a news story about a disaster at a chemical plant in Louisiana, going so far as to create fake Web pages and news videos to add realism to the effort. Why? As Chen later explained, the intended effect was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.

In early 2016, Starbird and her research team embarked on a different but related analysis. Over the course of the first nine months of the year, they gathered any tweet about a shooting incident in the United States, including tweets using the words shooting, shootings, gunman or gunmen and any tweets that used language indicating skepticism about the official story of an attack: hoax, false flag meaning an attack secretly launched by authorities to push a political agenda and crisis actor, a term for people theoretically playing roles in a false-flag type of attack. The team then analyzed the data, looking at how alternative narratives a nonjudgmental way of saying conspiracy theories took root and spread.

Of course, the first nine months of 2016 was a particularly interesting time to document the spread of rumors on the Internet. And, sure enough, Starbird documented an ecosystem with which many would soon become intimately familiar as the campaign of Donald Trump was bolstered by the same sort of doubt and factual relativism that Chens Russians sought to sow.

The graph below shows the result of Starbirds work. Bigger dots show domains that were mentioned more frequently in tweets her team analyzed. The size of links between them indicate how frequently the same user tweeted links to those two domains. They are colored by type: purple is mainstream media; aqua, alternative media; red, government-controlled media.

The story that image tells isnt simple to extract. For example, why, in a network of conspiracy theories, is The Washington Post so big?

One of the major shooting events Starbird documented was the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. As it turns out, The Post debunked conspiracy theories about that attack. Wed also written about a professor who was fired for claiming that the attack at Sandy Hook was a hoax. Both of those articles were resonant within that universe of people discussing whether or not shootings in 2016 were real or manufactured, for perhaps obvious reasons. And one less obvious reason: That The Post was debunking the conspiracy theories was seen by some as evidence supporting the theory. After all, the Establishment must have been spooked if The Post were going to that trouble.

As Starbird summarized that argument: Look, the mainstream media says this is untrue. This is even more evidence that it must be true.

Several sites were central to sharing and fostering the hoax theories: BeforeItsNews.com, NoDisinfo.com and VeteransToday.com. One trait she noticed among this galaxy of sites was that the same story or theory was often repurposed among multiple sites, giving readers an impression of corroboration when what was actually happening was duplication.

Also prominent is Newsbusters.org, a site run by the conservative group Media Research Center which itself is heavily funded by the Mercer family, who helped guide Trumps victory in 2016. Newsbusters stated aim is to unearth the bias of the liberal media meaning, in short, that its in the business of positioning many mainstream media outlets as fundamentally untrustworthy, making it of use to those wishing to promote alternative narratives.

Its prominent in Starbirds graph, she said, mostly thanks to another name that you may be familiar with from the 2016 election: Mike Cernovich, a prominent voice in the far-right social media community. A Cernovich tweet of a Newsbusters story about how CNN edited a statement from the victim of a shooting was used by Cernovich to suggest that mainstream narratives are often wrong.

Two Russian government-backed sites, RT.com and Sputnik, were also included in the alternate-narrative conversations. RT (formerly Russia Today) would duplicate stories from a site called 21stCenturyWire a site which was generally shared by users in Starbirds dataset who also shared stories from NoDisinfo and VeteransToday.

A node on that graph you might expect to see is Infowars, a site predicated on sharing poorly sourced theories of this nature. But Infowars, while prominent, stands apart from the main network. Thats in part because a lot of the accounts tweeting Infowars links were automated, Starbird said.

It was amplified by an army of bots, she said. Of the tweets she collected, probably 80 percent, maybe even 90 percent were accounts that sent only one tweet that I captured, it pointed to Infowars, it was usually a retweet of another account. This was evidence, she said, of a pretty unsophisticated bot.

Bots played a much bigger role in boosting another site so much so that Starbird removed it from the graph because it was so inflated. TheRealStrategy.com coordinated hundreds of accounts that tweeted content related to several different alternative narratives from these events and others, she writes in an article about her research.

These bots were much more sophisticated and looked more like actual social media users.

We think they were borrowing a set of accounts or leasing them, Starbird said, where certain accounts all of a sudden changed their profiles to become part of this botnet for a set period of time, and then they go back and later theyre tweeting about something else for somebody else. In his analysis, Chen noted that the Russian disinformation agency was also selectively loyal. While many of the users he was following had stopped tweeting by the middle of 2016, some continued, he writes, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump.

The central challenge Starbird encountered was in determining which properties are emergent and which properties are orchestrated that is, what parts of a network of conspiracy theorists is a function of natural skepticism and information-sharing and which part is bolstered by the use of automation and/or to promote a particular idea. Starbirds study, limited in scope, couldnt suss out where that boundary might lie.

Her research, though, did reveal a common theme from 2012 when she analyzed the Deepwater Horizon spill data through 2016: a group of sites focused mainly on opposition to globalist and corporate hegemony that peddled in alternative explanations for the world around them. These themes (and that strategy) have been echoed by Trump and his team.

It also demonstrated to her the extent to which these sites and this network powers an alternate arguments in American politics, bot-driven or not.

I dont know how far these ideas are echoing, she said in a telephone interview. It just became clear to me that they werent as marginal as I originally thought they were.

See more here:
The web of conspiracy theorists that was ready for Donald Trump - Washington Post

We are not yet 100 days into the Trump presidency, but already the president has clocked one unenviable milestone after another. Its all too easy to take for granted the broken norms that characterize this administration. So its important to pause and consider just how unprecedented the craziness has been. Herewith, a partial list of the myriad ways in which Donald Trump has already gone where no president has gone before.

He is the first president to:

Be elected with the help of a hostile foreign power. The U.S. intelligence community released a unanimous assessment on Jan. 6 that concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, and that Putin aspired to help President-elect Trumps election chances.

Be investigated by the FBI for possible collusion with that same hostile foreign power. FBI Director James B. Comey has confirmed that his agents are looking into the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

So fulsomely express admiration for a Russian dictator Trump has praised Putin for being very smart, strong and a real leader, while dismissing any concerns about Putins numerous human rights violations by saying, You think our country is so innocent?

Lie so regularly and brazenly, and often about matters, such as the size of his inauguration crowds, that are of little consequence. PolitiFact reports that only 17% of Trumps statements are true or mainly true, with the rest ranging from half true to pants on fire.

Accuse his predecessor of Watergate/Nixon crimes by supposedly putting a tapp on his phones, and to then be publicly called out on his lies by his own FBI and National Security Agency directors, who testified that they know of no evidence that President Obama tapped Trump.

Rely so prominently on his family in government. After John F. Kennedy made his brother attorney general, Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967. Based on a questionable legal interpretation, however, the administration claims the statute doesnt apply to White House staff. Trump is giving his daughter Ivanka a security clearance and a West Wing office without forcing her to give up ownership of her clothing company, while making her husband, Jared Kushner, lead adviser on relations with China, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East, all subjects on which he has no background.

Have so many blatant conflicts of interest. Since winning the presidency, Trump has doubled membership fees at his Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, to $200,000 and won valuable trademark protections from China. He has not placed his ownership of the Trump Organization into a blind trust. His sons, who are running his real estate empire, continue to pursue lucrative deals with dubious, politically connected tycoons from Turkey, Dubai, Malaysia and other countries. Its hard to track all of the conflicts of interest, because of course Trump is also the first president in decades to not release his taxes.

Appoint his former campaign chairman to the National Security Councils Principals Committee in spite of his lack of national security credentials. True, President Reagan made campaign manager William J. Casey his CIA director, but Casey had previously served in the OSS the agencys predecessor and in senior government positions. By contrast, Stephen K. Bannon formerly ran Breitbart News, a white-nationalist website, before being granted rank comparable to Defense secretary or secretary of State.

Fire his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, after only 24 days in office, because Flynn lied about making contact with the Russian ambassador. The shortest previous tenure on record was Richard Allen, who lasted nearly a year at the beginning of the Reagan administration.

Alienate so many allies so quickly. Since taking office, Trump has offended the heads of state in Mexico, Australia, Germany, Sweden, France and the United Kingdom.

Leave so many executive branch jobs vacant. Of 553 key positions, Trump has failed to fill 488 of them 88%. At the departments of State and Defense, the only confirmed appointees are the Cabinet members.

So vitriolically attack the judiciary. Trump attacked a federal judge who put a hold on his executive order on immigration as a so-called judge who issued a terrible decision that will result in many very bad and dangerous people pouring into our country. Even Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, called the presidents attacks demoralizing and disheartening.

Publicly denounce the media as the enemy of the American people. He regularly castigates the fake news media for reporting truthfully on his administration, with special venom for the failing New York Times, whose stock has risen 30% since the election.

Be so ignorant of public policy. According to New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, citing a senior European diplomat, at his recent meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump knew nothing of the proposed European-American deal known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, little about Russian aggression in Ukraine or the Minsk agreements, and was so scatterbrained that German officials concluded that the presidents daughter Ivanka, who had no formal reason to be there, was the more prepared and helpful.

See two of his signature initiatives an attempt to limit Muslim immigration and to repeal Obamacare defeated so early in his first term.

It should be no surprise that as a result of all of these firsts, Trump has chalked up another dubious achievement: He is the first president to have such low approval ratings so soon after taking office. According to Gallup, just 38% of those surveyed approve of Trumps job performance. The lowest previous tally for any president about two months after taking office was 53%; that was Bill Clintons mark in 1993. As Trump would say, we live in unpresidented times.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to Opinion.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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Let's count the ways Donald Trump has gone where no president has gone before - Los Angeles Times

Russian hackers didnt stop when the presidential election ended theyre still working to spread fake news and conspiracy theoriesacross the U.S.,an intelligence expert warns. And theyre building on PresidentDonald Trumpswiretapping tweets, former FBI agentClint Wattstold National Public Radio.

The operations are constantly reaching out to the Trump administration in an effort to push their own fake news, or to amplify something the president has tweeted, said Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who testified last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the presidential election.

One of those tweets include Trumps baseless claim that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration, Watts said.

If you went online today, you could see these accounts either bots or actual personas somewhere that are trying to connect with the administration, Watts said in the NPR interview Monday.They might broadcast stories and then follow up with another tweet that tries to gain the presidents attention or theyll try and answer the tweets that the president puts out.

Watts, a cyber security expert who has been tracking Russian activity for three years, called it a circular system. Sometimes the propaganda outlets themselves will put out false or manipulated stories. Other times, the president will go with a conspiracy, he told NPR.

An example is Trumps claim that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower, Watts said. Hackers and bots respond to the wiretapping claim with further conspiracy theories about that claim, and that just amplifies the message in the [internet] ecosystem.

Every time a conspiracy is floated from the administration, it provides every outlet around the world an opportunity to amplify that conspiracy and to add more manipulated truths or falsehoods onto it, he added.

Its a loop, said Watts, of spiraling misinformation.

You dont know where it started, said Watts, referring to Trumps wiretapping claim, which the FBI has flatly denied. You dont know if it comes from the administration or if the administration picked it up from another outlet, which is part of the debate if you remember back when that [wiretapping] claim came out. Did he [Trump] hear that inside the government, or did that actually come from his news feed? And it sounds like the latter, it came from his news feed.

Watts said the massive cyber operations involve Russia hackers in different parts of Russian intelligence and propagandists all with general guidelines about what to pursue, but doing it at different times and paces and rhythms.

He said he has faith in two of the three U.S. investigations into Russian interference in the American presidential election, pointedly leaving out the House probe.He praised the Senate investigation, and said he hascomplete confidence in the FBI.

Dont take silence for them being inept. Thats very much untrue, he said of the FBI. What they do is they are deliberate. They gather facts. And they dont talk about it. Theyre not open about these discussions. And they dont reveal anything till they can make good conclusions.

Russian officials have repeatedly denied interfering in the U.S. elections and said the Kremlindoesnt want citizens to get involved in cyber crimes.

You can read Watts full interview with NPRhere.

Read the original post:
Russian Hackers Are Working To Amplify Donald Trump's Wiretapping Claim, Expert Warns - Huffington Post

On the surface, and politics aside, Xi and Trump appear a world apart.

A real estate mogul turned reality television star before winning the White House race in a major upset, Trump relishes the spotlight and combats his political enemies -- including the news media -- through bouts of insulting tweets shared with his millions of Twitter followers.

The Chinese president rarely strays from jargon-filled scripts and has no presence on any global social media platforms, many of which -- including Twitter -- are blocked in China by his internet censors.

In his inaugural speech, Trump decried that "the establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country," adding that the day he was sworn in as president would be "remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again."

To many Chinese, these lines sounded eerily familiar, echoing battle cries during Mao's tumultuous Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s.

That movement began as Mao called on the masses to topple a corrupt power structure dominated by party elites, but it ended up paralyzing China for a decade and leaving a whole nation scarred from political persecutions and physical violence.

"They have the same kind of concepts like 'overturning society,' the same kind of idea of 'you can't have construction without destruction.'"

Both men also view politics as something extremely personal, yearning to be respected while having little idea how to act respectfully, Schell added.

"I think Trump, like Mao, has a kind of very visceral antipathy or antagonism toward people who don't agree with him or cannot be bullied," he said.

"He's very much in the Maoist tradition, bypassing educated people, the media, artists and, in many ways, even bypassing science, resisting any kind of restraint on him."

Other analysts see the similarity as well, but warn against drawing too many parallels between the two men based on their personalities or by "cherry-picking a few slices from history."

"Mao wasn't an isolated phenomenon -- he represented certain ideals and values that spread around the world," said He Pin, the founder of Mingjing News, an influential Chinese-language media company based in New York that publishes books and runs websites on Chinese politics.

"The Maoist ideal about a fairer society... was actually closer to the US Democrats' values," he added. "Trump believes in strength -- he believes that's the only way to change things. And he believes in money -- he's the ultimate pragmatist."

Both He and Schell see a silver lining in Trump's "Maoist" mentality when it comes to recalibrating US-China relations, which have been strained by China's stubborn trade surplus over the US and Beijing's increasingly assertive military stance in territorial disputes with American allies in Asia.

For too long, they argue, the Communist leadership in Beijing has been taking advantage of successive administrations in Washington -- benefiting from an open global trade system advocated by the US, and then using its rising economic might to reinforce an authoritarian political system at home and fund its strategic expansion abroad -- all at the expense of American interests.

"Such an imbalanced relationship is simply terrible," said He. "Trump may be ...illogical or clueless about politics, but he knows that things have to change -- and the only way to do so is through unconventional means."

"As he turns the world upside down, China must feel nervous."

Despite Trump's fiery attacks on the campaign trail -- accusing China of "raping" the US economy and stealing millions of American jobs, among other things -- his administration has taken a relatively hands-off approach in dealing with Beijing so far.

Xi has compelling reasons to work with Trump, as the Chinese leader prepares to start his second five-year term as the head of the ruling Communist Party in the fall.

As he focuses on further consolidating power, Xi may find external distractions like a flare-up in US-China relations undesirable as he, like Trump, tries to address myriad domestic challenges. In Xi's case, these range from a slowing economy and widening income gap, to persistent political corruption despite his crackdown.

"All of Trump's contradictory rhetoric has put China somewhat off balance and that's not a bad thing," Schell said.

"If he plays his cards right, if (US Secretary of State Rex) Tillerson and (US Secretary of Defense James) Mattis play their cards right, they could restore some sort of balance to the relationship -- and make it more stable and more functional."

Read more:
Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and the Mao factor - CNN

The Trump administration appears to be cracking down on U.S. companies that frequently use H-1B temporary skilled worker visas, promising spot inspections and more effective government response to allegations of visa fraud.

But legal experts and right-wing immigration reform advocates agree that the proposals sound much more effective than they really are.

United States Customs and Immigrations Services announced in a Monday press release that the agency will be taking a more targeted approach when visiting the workplaces of H-1B employees. USCIS has set up a new email address to solicit alleged abuse of the program, and the agency plans to focus on H-1B-dependent employers, or companies with at least 15 percent of employees on the visas.

Additionally, a report from Axios pointed to a separate USCIS memo quietly released over the weekend suggesting that computer programmers are no longer presumed to be eligible for H-1B visas. The change, according to the guidance, is that H-1B applicants may be asked to supply further evidence of their technical credentials for computer-related work.

When the H-1B visa was introduced in 1990, it was viewed as a way to get highly skilled workers temporarily into the country; between 1990 and 2014, the number of H-1B visas annually approved grew from 800 to more than 160,000. But critics say that over the last two and a half decades, it has evolved into a stopgap measure that is somewhere between a tourist visa and a green card. The result is a program disliked by both proponents of protectionism and those who want more relaxed immigration policies.

Though the USCIS press release about site targeting drew attention for its protectionist language, the memo about what might happen to software workers initially appeared to be of greater consequence. Data from the agency show that in 2015, the most recent year for which such information is available, computer-related occupations accounted for 66.5 percent of the roughly 275,000 H-1B visa applications approved.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, said that Trump had missed an opportunity to implement serious reform like eliminating the H-1B lottery altogether. And Matt OBrien, the research director at the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the USCIS guidance change on software workers was last-minute posturing.

Most people who believe immigration is a rule-of-law issue and an issue of consistent enforcement have not been satisfied with the progress [of the Trump administration on H-1B visas], OBrien said. Its a half step that probably isnt going to accomplish a whole lot.

Deborah J. Notkin, a lawyer specializing in corporate immigration work at Barst Mukamal & Kleiner, called it a very confusing document that had arrived at the 11th or 12th hour for companies applying for H-1B visas. She said the document largely reflected the enforcement policies practiced by the Obama administration in the last few years, and that the main problem was releasing the memo after most companies had already applied for the H-1B lottery.

Its like asking you to file for your drivers license, and then saying you have to provide more than one birth certificate after the application has already been filed, Notkin said.

Wall Street doesnt seem to think the USCIS moves will have much of an impact either. When rumors were flying in early February about supposedly imminent H-1B visa reform, tech companies took a hit, particularly large foreign outsourcing firms like Infosys and Wipro that deal heavily with H-1B visas; those companies lost billions of dollars in market value on the assumption that their businesses would be weakened by reform.

Such companies have bounced back in a big way on the stock market since then, and Mondays news didnt really move the needle on their share prices. In early March, Indian media reported that they planned to significantly cut the number of their H-1B visa applications to the U.S. regardless.

In Silicon Valley, companies like Facebook and Google also use H-1B visas to source talent from abroad. On Monday, FWD.us,a pro-immigrant advocacy group with deep connections to Silicon Valley in general and Facebook in particular, unveiled a new initiative aiming to fix and expand the outdated H-1B Visa to attract the best & brightest to come to the U.S., from across the globe.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in March that the opportunity still remained open for Congress to take action. A Senate bill to reform the H-1B program sponsored by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin was introduced in January; the bill has been praised by both left- and right-leaning immigration experts.

Notkin said, however, that the writings on the wall, spelling out what the Trump administration aims to do with H-1B visas: tougher crackdowns on specific companies, and a more restrictive application process.

I could see USCIS making a mess out of this, she said. We shall see. It will be an interesting H-1B season.

See more here:
Donald Trump's wimpy new war on Silicon Valley's favorite visas - VICE News