Ain't gonna' lie, this topic has held about the same amount of my interest as the Hillary email thingy. Which means that on a scale of 1-10, I'd give it a D+. Therefore, I have not and probably will never do any research on it. Having said that, since it appears to be becoming a hotter topic each day, can someone post a brief summary of what the hell it's all about?
The Russians hacked emails? Whose emails did they hack?
They influenced the election? How? Did they alter emails? How would Russia hacking emails or Tweeters or Bookfaces or Instagrounds or Snaptwat have any influence on how somebody voted?
I'm not asking this as if I'm insinuating one side or the other (Dems/Repugs) is or should be butthurt. I get other countries hacking shit as a problem for National security. But, can someone splain their effect on the election?
Cliffs: When people say Russians "tampered" with the election, they don't mean rigged polling machines or fabricated any emails. They mean they actively influenced public opinion.
The first iteration of "Fake News", before it got appropriated (rightly IMO) back at the "mainstream media" for shoddy fact checking, was a term specifically used for sites that propagated patently false, intentionally misleading "news" about Hillary Clinton. Sites like ABCnew.com.
co or CNN.
website that are meant to mimic real news sites but had stories about Hillary Clinton engaging in criminal activity, being on her death bed, etc. While I'm all on board with dishing the "Fake News" moniker back at CNN etc. when they get important facts wrong even if to push an agenda, it's a wholly different phenomenon than these completely made up, intentionally deceiving websites.
The vast majority of those sites
were out of Russia. Knowing the oligarchy that Russia is, it is reasonable to assume Putin had a hand in that.
The second thing is the hacked DNC emails. Two things there. One, I was originally highly skeptical at the validity of claims that we knew for sure the hacks originated from the Russian government. However, every day recently it is becoming clearer and clearer that we do have evidence that this is true. Does it mean that what the Podesta emails brought to light was untrue or invalid? No. The stuff in the emails was real (outside of some of the disjointed Pizzagate theories invented from crazy InfoWars readers) and the source of the leaks are irrelevant in that regard. But they are kind of relevant in that we should be concerned that the Russian government "interfered" with our election in that way. Why were they motivated to pick a side? And even if you think they preferred Trump to Hillary that much for completely innocuous reasons, is it ethical for a foreign government to interfere in that way?
And now, with the recent news with Flynn, we now know that Trump's campaign was actively communicating with Russian Intelligence AND lied about it to American Intelligence. That is a big problem.
We'll see what comes of all of this, but that is the Cliffs of what is going on.
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