Free Republic

In their book "Shattered," Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report that within 24 hours of losing the presidential election, Hillary Clinton was ordering her campaign to argue that it was hacked by Russia. Just as reporters leaped to find "news" to corroborate her allegations of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" (VRWC for short) during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, they have lunged at stories of Russian interference to validate VRWC 2.0. Second verse, same as the first. The media outlets most deeply invested in the narrative about Russia having somehow masterfully manipulated the 2016 election are beginning to struggle as the actual...

Leah wrote earlier this week about the Washington Post’s trip up regarding their story about Barack Obama, Facebook, and Russia. The Post stepped on a rake when they reported that Obama reached out to Mark Zuckerberg about Russia, fake news, and taking the spread of this disinformation seriously during the 2016 election. The problem is that Russia was never mentioned: Facebook clarified that when the former president did reach out to the tech giant about political disinformation campaigns on the site during the 2016 election, he never called out Russia specifically, which makes their initial headline completely wrong. Axios reported...

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign. The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary...