How Russia Used American Rage in 2016

Cultural hacking...

Facebook: Back in the spotlight over Russian hacking in 2016.

YouTube videos of police beatings on American streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night.

All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election, Nick Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi report on nytimes.com.

A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms, they wrote.

For more of what has been labelled "cultural hacking:" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/technology/russia-election-facebook-ads-rage.html

Pogo, one of our wisest cartoon characters.

Photos: Pinterest.

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