causepix

“The Department’s seizure of 32 internet domains secretly deployed to spread foreign malign influence demonstrates once again that Russia remains a predominant foreign threat to our elections,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “At Putin’s direction, Russian companies SDA, Structura, and ANO Dialog used cybersquatting, fabricated influencers, and fake profiles to covertly promote AI-generated false narratives on social media. Those narratives targeted specific American demographics and regions in a calculated effort to subvert our election. Our republic depends on elections that are free from foreign interference, and we will not rest in our efforts to expose foreign malign influence operations and protect our democracy, without fear or favor.”

The propaganda did not identify, and in fact purposefully obfuscated, the Russian government or its agents as the source of the content. The perpetrators extensively utilized “cybersquatted” domains, a method of registering a domain intended to mimic another person or company’s website (e.g., registering washingtonpost.pm to mimic washingtonpost.com), to publish Russian government messaging falsely presented as content from legitimate news media organizations. In other instances, the perpetrators sought to create their own unique media brands to promote Doppelganger content (e.g., Recent Reliable News). Among the methods Doppelganger used to drive viewership to the cybersquatted and unique media domains was the deployment of “influencers” worldwide, paid social media advertisements (in some cases created using artificial intelligence tools), and the creation of social media profiles posing as U.S. (or other non-Russian) citizens to post comments on social media platforms with links to the cybersquatted domains, all of which attempted to trick viewers into believing they were being directed to a legitimate news media outlet’s website.

As far as I can tell this has diddly squat to do with Kirk? He's been around long enough that I'm gonna need you to clear a pretty high bar of evidence to call him an entirely Russian fabrication (in fact this would suggest that he is entirely AI generated).

Another thing, why would you absolve American media organizations of their interests in a guy like Kirk? Like you said, our media has parroted the types of things that Kirk did since long before the internet age, but there's a good number of folks like him in the modern day. Are you saying they are all built from the ground up by russian crypto? Are we ignoring the interests of American corporations, billionaires, religious zealots, and their related super PACs in election meddling and dark money?

One that wants to recruit more fascists and fascist sympathizers?

Yeah, we all know the nazis only became fascists the day they killed their first victims. All those nazi propagandists and theorists were actually blameless because they didn't personally assault anyone publicly, which is famously the only form of violence.

I've yet to see a convincing explanation of why China would even be interested in this data... what good would it even be to them?

We know American tech, media giants, and government contractors and agencies use it for profit and domestic control but, even if you believe China is just as much of a dystopian capitalist surveillance-state as the USA, what profit is there for Chinese capitalists to extract from American data that they can't already extract much more efficiently through American data brokers? As for the government end, is the interest in having control over Americans in American territory even comparable to that of the American government? It's not like the vast majority of the data would even be actionable or relevant to the Chinese government.

It just doesn't make sense for Chinese capitalists/government to be even a fraction as aggressive in surveilling Americans as their American counterparts. It seems more like a distraction to me and an excuse to avoid talking about American surveillance being every bit as bad as you imagine Chinese surveillance to be.

As for being the "largest exporters in the global market", if the profit was all that enticing on a private scale, the US capitalist class certainly could have chosen to compete with China in that avenue. They chose to boost their short term profits by deindustrializating instead. What does that tell you?

Sure, if you assume their "political enemies" are the Republicans. Rather than assume incompetence; because, you're right, this is a pretty glaring oversight that only bumbling incompetence could begin to explain away; you could make a much more fitting assessment with the "political enemy" being the working class.

That is who this law is being wielded against, the only ones who were ever threatened by it, along with being completely disempowered to abuse it against the ruling class who passed it. Those are the enemies that fit your description.

The problem is that a capitalist system will not allow itself to be reformed in this way, as the "reforms" that Marx poses are antithetical to the very foundation of capitalism.

To give some accessible examples; you can't house homeless people or give people healthcare and higher education because homelessness and debt is a whip to keep the workers working for whatever wage and conditions are offered by a capital owner. You can't deconstruct racism because it was invented in the first place to keep the working class at war with itself rather than struggling against the conditions set by the ruling class. You can't stop imperialism because infinite growth requires infinite and unrestricted expansion into new territories.

The system of capitalism manufactures its own required conditions through cruelty and social inequality (and yet, it's these very things that lead to resistance), and without those necessary components the whole system collapses. The ruling class will not allow this to happen, because this system serves their material interests, and thus fundamental change cannot happen until the working class; whose material interests are directly opposed to those of the ruling class; is in power. The ruling class will pay lip service and the occasional half-measure in order to obscure this reality and make "reformism" seem possible, but 1) that is all they will do especially in the absence of a real threat to their power and 2) they will always eventually claw back even the smallest and hardest-fought of crumbs. Crumbs are good and all but there comes a point where our energy is better spent fighting for the whole cake.