It's difficult to upvote this. The shill for Hillary thing nearly killed it but you wrote a lot of words after that early mention.
It was also formatted reasonably well. That goes a long way in my profession.
You aren't entirely incorrect. I think you and I would have a really solid, non yelling, conversation regarding this over a few beers.
The List of sites is around 1/3rd in alignment with mine. Mine is a lot longer, though.
Would you humor me for a moment? I didn't respond to your comment with, "lol lost credibility at Hillary shill" and I'm typing this with my thumbs at five in the morning. We at that narrative Trust Fall? Rad. There's a backstory. Understand it's necessitated.
I've been researching this since March. That's less of an authority statement and more of an acknowlement that I've run through a lot of scenarios that aren't OMG RUSSIA. Maybe I missed a few: it's OK if I did. I'm more than happy to be incorrect.
The reason I got involved in this was through the involvement in around 162 groups as founder in honest narrative, assisting in admin roles, or founder in Poe's Law narrative. Facebook's consolidation method for duplicate URLs shared in multiple groups/friends on your feed makes it reasonably obvious to notice spam shares.
Oh hey, look. Three of your friends all want to share a duplicate link for cheap Oakley's. Weirdly enough: all with the same muspellings, Capitalizing things Improperly But somewhat ErraTically, or to the wording it Awkwardly like in ESL the way.
That isn't proof of Russia involvement. I hope you smirked reading that since 90% of the things I've responded to this year would end around there.
What that does do is get us at a mutual thing we've both (hopefully) seen: multiple accounts are easily controlled and, more often than not, the addition of 18(ish) lines of code to randomize any portion of 'Say something...' is more effort than it(')s worth.
Early in this game, I started creating meticulously-culled feeds under Custom Feed. None of them binary, mostly just Venn diagrams on differing or similar thermoclines of rhetoric.
It's March and the problem is obviously past Just Spam. Hopefully you called me on "obviously." I'm telling you: we'd have a good conversation in person.
"Obviously" emerged when the same story, or a varient +/- 5% thereof, showed up on the 20th-some-odd domain. Same or almost completely same story. Interlinking citations to other false narrative sites hyperlinked. Hard pause on content loading until the prioritized ads loaded.
I hear Drivers In (my area by IP) are Pissing the Cops the Fuck Off and I Need to Read About How.
My first question wasn't, "WHO IS THE PUPPET MASTER," really. The first was wondering why everyone was from Macedonia or Brazil but that isn't an accusation in any sense since neither country has a negative prerogative historically and no one would be that obvious. Even if they were framing an actor. The second was wondering why HealthNewsHealthyAnotherSemiRelatedWordNewsNow dot WhoCares was interested in politics.
Cool sidetrack: if you're in the clickspam business abroad - at least before this election got off the ground last year - health news sites were the biggest draw for clicks outside of a specific trending topic. That's been the case for a while: the West visits Health and Beauty sites at a lesser but still disproportionate rate. It's a good metric to use for propagation when you don't want to use pornography (since that's an inherently flawed propagation model).
OK. Question. Were they just sitting on the domains or was this a health site? Sup, WayBack. OK. So it was a health spam site. But the stories aren't spam in nature now and use picture that aren't whatever ShuStock archive they tormented. That's weird.
Also still not an implication of Russia.
You've been remarkably patient with this Trust Fall. Here's the point.
I study narrative and propagation. After HRC had pulled enough delegates to seal it when added to the (super stupid) superdelegate count, and forever after, the narrative from these outlets was one of two: BERNIE STILL HAS A CHANCE WITH WRITE IN or... actually, that's the only narrative.
"What's that have to do with anything?"
You try being the rodeo admin of 20 previously-productive 15-350k-person groups and watching rational narrative disintegrate. I understand that, not knowing me, that's anecdotal evidence. Running into that problem when framing this narrative, I wrote a Python script that grabbed similar links shared across several hundred hundred groups, checked the text of the link versus text on previous links scanned, pinged for similarities in CSS / WP / AdServ IDs.
The tl,dr on the rest of the metrics and result is that a small number of propagation sites wrote their own articles (epiphany there, right?) and that they all came from one of five or six sources. Most of them NewsMax or Medium. The few times it was original narrative, it was a specifically mislabeled picture.
Here's a dumb litmus I picked up because this needs to wrap. I've taken too much of your time attempting to establish I don't fully disagree with you but that there's more to it than simple spam or Russia being responsible for everything I see that I don't agree with.
Spam: Will you support Donald Trump kicking out immigrants / Miley wants to leave under Trump should she leave?
Problem: How Bernie could win with 550k write-in's MUST READ
You made some solid points to other forms of narrative control going on right now. There are woke issues I have with the list on this site. I can almost understand some unintentional ones. NutritionFacts dot org: maybe swept in during a href pull, enough references showing up, and being added. That also tells me no one actually checked the list in the unlikely event the above version was the cause.
And that the author doesn't understand when to use quotes. Good indicators of education? Handling of "quotes", especially with punctuation and sometimes-"hyphenated" things.
There is a monumental issue right now with narrative. Specifically polarized messages, with active or passive calls to action, become pretty apparent moving through these stories.
Also.
WL has some serious problems, though - and I say that as one of a handful of curators who left over a Warlock, JDAM and maintenance manual. That stated, RU has little to do with that problem. I'm sure Russia isn't /dis/pleased. But I'd guess that had a lot more to with making internal gossip seem like state secrets and further alienating young D-Progressives from their party versus being some RU state puppet.
I can't believe I shit that much out through my thumbs. Hopefully that comment will exist in an hour.