I Say Things

Hi Tumblr,

We’re all grappling with the influence that state-sponsored disinformation campaigns can have on our political conversations—and how wide-spread that interference turned out to be. So please take a moment to read this, think about it, and talk about it.

Last fall, we uncovered 84 Tumblr accounts linked to the Russian government through the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. These accounts were being used as part of a disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 U.S. election. After uncovering the activity, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts. Behind the scenes, we worked with the Department of Justice, and the information we provided helped indict 13 people who worked for the IRA.

Now that the investigations are done, we want to let you know how we’re going to help protect Tumblr in the future and what you can do to help.

Here’s what we know about these accounts

The IRA employs more than 1,000 people who engage in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. Their goal is to sow division and discontent in the countries they target. What makes them so difficult to spot is that they’re not spambots. They’re real people who get trained and paid to spread propaganda.

As far as we can tell, the IRA-linked accounts were only focused on spreading disinformation in the U.S., and they only posted organic content. We didn’t find any indication that they ran ads.

Remember, the IRA and other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns play off our zero-sum politics. They want to drive a wedge between us so that we spend our time fighting with each other instead of building towards the future. We’ll be watching for signs of future activity, but the best defense is knowing how they operate and how to judge the content you see.

What we’re doing in response to the interference

First, we’ll be emailing anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with.

Second, we’re going to start keeping a public record of usernames we’ve linked to the IRA or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. We’re committed to transparency and want you to know everything that we know.

We’ve decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs—you can choose to leave them or delete them. We’re letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original post. Removing those authentic posts without your consent would encroach on your free speech—and there have been enough disruptions to our conversations as it is.

What we’re doing to stop future disinformation campaigns

You’ve probably read that U.S. intelligence officials expect foreign agents to try similar propaganda campaigns in the future. We’ll be monitoring Tumblr for signs of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, and if we see anything we will…

Terminate the accounts and remove their original posts.

Notify you if we determine that you’ve liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed a propaganda account.

Add the username to the public record.

Alert law enforcement.

There are also things you can do to help stop the spread of disinformation and propaganda.

Be aware that people want to manipulate the conversation. Knowing that disinformation and propaganda accounts are out there makes it harder for them to operate. The News Literacy Project has this handy checklist for spotting their tricks.

Be skeptical of things you read. Disinformation campaigns work because they know people don’t fact check. Look for reliable sources, and double-check that the source really says the same thing as the post. You can also check Snopes and Politifact. Both are award-winning resources and usually have the latest viral claim fact checked on the front page. 

Correct the record. When you see people spreading misinformation—even unintentionally—politely say something in a reblog or reply. If it’s your friend, send them a message to let them know.

One last note: Please vote.

“They used stolen or fictitious American identities, fraudulent bank accounts, and false identification documents. The defendants posed as politically and socially active Americans, advocating for and against particular political candidates.”

It would be nice if all the scaremongering pieces about “Russian trolls” would open with, ya know, the actual charges against them, rather than just saying “election interference” as though that actually means anything. The issue here is identity theft, not merely spreading lies.

The really creepy thing about the whole “election interference” thing is … look, I’m British. I post about American politics sometimes, and I really regret not doing more to try and make sure Trump wasn’t elected (looking into whether Brits can volunteer for phone campaigns or whatever). Do you want to make that illegal?

American politics is literally impossible to escape for the rest of the world. There are only 5x more Americans than Brits, but from the political conversations I see online, you’d think it was 100x. So many Brits have stronger opinions on American politics (Trump, black lives matter, gun control) than on our own issues and laws, because they get their politics from the Internet and literally don’t hear about British politics happening.

It really screws up our own political discourse, because people talk about British issues as though they’re the same as US issues and they’re really not. (Racism, for instance, is totally different here, and white/black is not a useful binary when so much of UK racism is against “white” people like Eastern Europeans. Also if I hear one more person call black British people “African American” I’m gonna delete the internet.)

And American politics affects non-Americans. If you people start a pointless war in the middle East that fucks everything up, you bet all of us are gonna be dragged into it too. If you people start a nuclear war, you’re gonna destroy the entire world. US aid policies not only decide whether a whole lot of people in poorer countries will live or die, Americans also have a track record of forcing poor countries to adopt policies they support - whether through influencing neoliberal policies that forced countries to adopt right-wing policies in order to get loans, or just outright financing the violent overthrow of any government you don’t like. Your financial policies don’t just impact your own markets, you can fuck up the entire world economy with your decisions because you’re such a huge part of it.

If America is going to try and be the leader of the free world, it needs to give a fucking vote to the free world. If it continues deciding policy for the entire world, then fuck yes, the rest of the world will have a perfectly legitimate interest in influencing US elections.

I don’t get to vote against Trump, because I wasn’t born in the US. But Trump can still fuck my life up, heck he could kill me if he really wanted. So yeah, I’m going to try and influence the votes of my American friends. I’m going to make social media posts telling them to go vote for things that I don’t have a say in.

The recent “oh no Russian social media interference” thing has… really creepily implied that that’s illegitimate.

If Russians posting that they support Bernie Sanders is illegal, so is Middle Easterners posting “hey, US folks, please don’t vote for politicians who want to bomb me and kill my entire family!” …and no that’s not illegitimate, that’s people pleading for their fucking lives, which they absolutely ought to be able to do.

There was a bit of this from the UK right wing, with people claiming it was unfair and terrible for EU citizens to speak out against Brexit because it was influencing the UK vote. And… no. It was undemocratic and evil that EU citizens living in the UK weren’t given a vote on a decision that affected their lives more than anyone else’s.

Fuck off. I'm not even British and this statement pisses me off.

There is absolutely nothing "Undemocratic" or "Evil" about denying the franchise to people who aren't fucking citizens of your country, and I don't care how long they've lived there or how personally they might be affected by what's on the ballot. It's not only morally acceptable to exclude people who aren't actually citizens from voting in elections, but it's absolutely absurd to expect anything else. It undermines the very notion of democracy, sovereignty, and national borders.

And as for influencing the politics of a country without being a citizen, I can see no rational argument against it. It's just speech, and individual foreign citizens or even large organizations and entire governments have every right to make their opinion known. If the Russian Government was actively paying to propogandize the American People then that only makes them guilty of doing exactly the same thing that both of the candidates were already guilty of doing.

Who gives a shit? Tell me when they do something more than just try to convince people to vote for "The other guy", or perform acts of journalism by revealing what one candidate or another actually factually said.

Foreign aid is A: a cost-effective way of spreading American influence worldwide, and B: is consistently under .3% GDP, or 1% of the yearly government budget.

The Chinese have been investing in it heavily,

(sources: link for Chinese and US aid spending , link for Chinese, US GDP),

and from all the screeching in Washington circles about the expansion of Chinese influence,  it seems to be paying dividends.

Also,

>National Science Foundation

>Wasteful

In this example, I'm certain there are some legacy programs being funded that are just completely unnecessary or otherwise wasteful, but which are simply being renewed because they've been packaged into some bill or another. So it would be a good idea to occasionally audit these funding bills to try to curb that as much as reasonably possible.

That’s a top-notch graph. Wish they’d broken down social sciences though.

What began as a simple idea, became a unique event in Latin America that show what the Anime can do, and how awesome Dragon Ball has become.

Many will know the story, an governor in Mexico gave the idea of transmitting the fight of Jiren and Goku in a town square, so much emotion caused among the people that many intendants and governors began to do the same. In other countries, such as Peru, Ecuador and Argentina, they also began to mobilize and get the whole world to talk about it:

News (Mexico)

News (Peru)

When Toei found out everything, It announced that without the rights, the transmission of episode 130 was prohibited, so many countries canceled all activity. 

The scandal provoked a press conference from the government of Mexico:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nYfmUTNi-c

But the love and fanaticism for Dragon Ball Super didn’t stop, and these were the results:

  Machala - Ecuador

https://twitter.com/ssav_alvarez/status/975189743649673216

Córdoba - Argentina

Colombia

Perú

Nicaragua

Mexico:

Cuidad Juárez - Chihuahua 

El Salvador 

Querétaro 

https://twitter.com/MarcosAguilar/status/975211165050601473

San Luis - Potosi 

Sonora 

https://twitter.com/Nogales_TV/status/975233195355594753

Nogales 

Pueblas

Nuevo Laredo 

Meanwhile, other cities of Latin America such as Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) although they got a lot of support in social networks and managing to be a trending topic on Twitter with hashtag like #DragonBallSuperEnElObelisco, didn’t have enough support from their government but they didn’t stop that to process it in bars and taverns, for example: 

Chile

This is soo crazy!!! 

Look at this: 

Commenters: Well no actually that wasn’t my experience at all