Mike Bloomberg tweeted a doctored debate video. Is it political spin or disinformation?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Following his lackluster performance in Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate , former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tweeted out a doctored video that made it look like he had a hugely successful moment on the debate stage, even though he didn’t.
And while politicians putting out campaign ads that take their opponents’ words out of context or are selectively edited to misconstrue their opponents’ positions is a practice basically as old as time itself, some experts are calling the Bloomberg video dangerous and unethical in a digital age rife with disinformation.
The 25-second clip starts with the mayor asking a question he really did pose in the debate: “I’m the only one here that I think has ever started a business — is that fair?”
What follows is a series of close-ups on everyone from former Vice President Joe Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) keeping quiet, looking confused and uncomfortable, all backed by background noise of crickets chirping.
Put together, it makes it look like Bloomberg had an epic mic-drop moment in which he thoroughly owned all of his opponents on the debate stage.
But that’s not what really happened .
In reality, there was a brief awkward silence after Bloomberg asked the question, but then he proceeded to talk about his vision for mentorship programs for young entrepreneurs.
When he finished, one of his opponents — Sanders — actually went on the attack to complain about a “corrupt political system, bought by billionaires like Mr. Bloomberg” that help the richest people pay fewer taxes.
Of course, every campaign makes videos and ads that make their candidate look good. Stretching the truth is a normal practice in politics, and it’s no surprise that Bloomberg’s or anybody’s team would put out a slickly edited, somewhat humorous video like that one.
And, yes, it’s also incumbent on the public to be discerning when a politician says or does anything.
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We don't need Democratic candidates using lowlife Trump type tactics on each other.
I seriously doubt any Democrats who learn of this will say "now I want Mike".
The TV ads I've seen would have me believe he was Obama's VP. They were an awesome team.
https://babylonbee.com/news/badly-beaten-bloomberg-rushed-to-tiny-hospital-in-tiny-ambulance?fbclid=IwAR37AakPX4a7tk2MPot5FMJJLjLj9y8u7190abaIxbNJi3FA8RIwHPrAREo
The actual time span between Bloomberg saying "I am the only one here who's ever started a business" , and his next comment "what we need is...." is less than 2 seconds.
When campaigns create "ads" like this, it serves two purposes.
First of all they can try to use it as literally what happened. People who saw the debate will know it is not true, but invariably there will be some who didnt see it live and dont know. They are potentially foolable.
The second use comes when the first fails. If someone says your video is not true, you just say, "of course its not true, its a joke." and then you can say "how could someone be fooled by this?"
You try to fool people, and then you tell those who were not fooled, "only kidding".
Bloomberg is supposed to be "classy" lol.
Bloomberg was interviewed on tv today. His excuse for his poor performance the other night is that "everyone was yelling at each other and "I didnt get a chance to say what I wanted to say". Another untruth on his part. He had plenty of chances to say what he wanted to say.
Watching him and Biden self destruct is great as it opens the door for the totally insane and easy to beat Bernie to win the nomination.
There is no place in this universe where Bernie Sanders is insane and Donald Trump isnt.
Bernie has my vote in our primary's
You're voting in a communist primary? shame on you
If Bernie gets the Democratic party's nomination you'll be voting for a Communist, shame on you.
Sanders is not a communist (assuming you are referring to that exemplified by the former USSR) … not even close. Sanders is a social democrat in spite of his inexplicable self-labeling. He is a big government statist who wants to redistribute wealth by taxing the capitalist engine and high income individuals to fund government programs designed to help the majority of people (focusing on lower and middle classes). His heart is in the right place but his brain is not generating a practical means to the end he desires.
Sanders has said he doesn't mind being called a communist. If a politician said "I don't mind being called a Nazi," I can't imagine he wouldn't be labeled a Nazi in our discourse.
It does not matter what Sanders calls himself or accepts (by the way, he took offense at Bloomberg referring to him as a communist).
What matters is what he is proposing. What he is proposing is not communism (if by communism one is referring to a system exemplified by the former USSR).
His actions say otherwise. After graduating with a political science degree, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he headed the American People’s History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda. There, he produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as “America’s greatest Marxist.”
This subversive hero of Sanders, denounced even by liberal Democrats as a “traitor,” bashed “the barons of Wall Street” and hailed the “triumphant” Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
“Those Russian comrades of ours have made greater sacrifices, have suffered more, and have shed more heroic blood than any like number of men and women anywhere on Earth,” Debs proclaimed. “They have laid the foundation of the first real democracy that ever drew the breath of life in this world.”
In a 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, Debs reaffirmed his solidarity with Lenin and Trotsky, despite clear evidence of their violent plunder and treachery.
Sanders still hangs a portrait of Debs on the wall in his Senate office.
In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all US banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
In 1985, he traveled to Managua to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” Undermining anti-communist US policy, Sanders denounced the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contra rebels in a letter to the Sandinistas.
His betrayal did not end there. Sanders lobbied the White House to stop the proxy war and even tried to broker a peace deal. He adopted Managua as a sister city and invited Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to visit the US. He exalted Ortega as “an impressive guy,” while attacking President Reagan.
“The Sandinista government has more support among the Nicaraguan people — substantially more support — than Ronald Reagan has among the American people,” Sanders told Vermont government-access TV in 1985.
Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the US.”
Today, Sanders wants to bring what he admired in the USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua and other communist states to America.
For starters, he proposes completely nationalizing our health care system and putting private health insurance and drug companies “out of business.” He also wants to break up “big banks” and control the energy industry, while providing “free” college tuition, a “living wage” and guaranteed homeownership and jobs through massive public works projects. Price tag: $18 trillion.
Who will pay for it all? You will. Sanders plans to not only soak the rich with a 90 percent-plus tax rate, while charging Wall Street a “speculation tax,” but hit every American with a “global-warming tax.”
Of course, even that wouldn’t cover the cost of his communist schemes; a President Sanders would eventually soak the middle class he claims to champion drastically raising taxes on everyone earning over 29K a year and putting a cap on how much any one person can earn in a year. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, right?
When Sanders was mayor of Burlington, VT he named their city softball squad the “People’s Republic of Burlington” and the town’s minor league baseball team the “Vermont Reds.” He also hung a Soviet flag in his office.
Sanders and his Sandinistas are all still pining for what Debs called “the Greater Revolution yet to come.”
What’s revolting is how this hardcore commie’s campaign has gotten this far. With his ascendancy in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders is no longer just a fool; he’s now a dangerous fool.
While it may be hard to hate the old codger, it’s easy — and virtuous — to hate his un-American ideas. They should be swept into the dustbin with the rest of communist history.
Don't be fooled by Bernie Sanders, he's a diehard Soviet Union communist.
Go by what he has done in Congress and what he has and is proposing. Ignore hit pieces.
What, specifically, does Sanders admire of the former USSR?
Go by what he has proposed, what he has actually done and what he is proposing. It is not what was exemplified by the former USSR.
Sanders is a social democrat. He references other social democracies (especially the Nordic nations) as models for what he sees for the USA. His policies are predominantly those of social democracy. Could not be more obvious.
Even if he's not a doctrainaire commuinst, he's been a fellow traveller or dupe of communists throughout his carreer. My point was more along of the lines of if anyone was as Nazi adjacent as Sanders has been to Communists, no one would blink an eye about calling that person a Nazi. Look how acceptble it is to call mainstream poltiicians like George Bush a Nazi, even though his politics were nothing like that of Nazi Germany.
The point I made, the one in the comment to which you replied, was that if someone votes for Sanders they are not voting for a USSR style system or anything resembling same. My point was that is NOT what Sanders is proposing.
I think Sanders' proposals are irrational and damaging for the USA. His heart seems to be in the right spot but he is entirely impractical. So I am no fan. But what he is proposing is NOT communism (that exemplified by the former USSR).
To your point (which is a very different matter entirely), people will of course try to demean him politically. By calling himself a socialist, Sanders has given them a very large bullseye. I am not arguing that he will not be demeaned, I am arguing that he is not a communist as defined and is not proposing anything like that.
He is a social democrat and is proposing policies aligned with social democracy.
Bernie is still a Communist dictator-loving thug. And, just so you know, the Democrat Socialist agenda is worse than that of the Communist Party USA. Dem Socialists left the National Socialists because they didn’t see them as extreme enough.
Really, so you see the Democratic Socialists (DSA) advocating a command economy? Do they seek repressive authoritarian rule? Do they seek a one-party system where there is a government / official class and then all others? (And, in this class system, it is rags or riches.) Do they seek predominant government ownership of industry?
I think the DSA are a bit confused and very idealistic, but they are most definitely not aficionados of communism as exemplified by the former USSR. They are more like unions on steroids.
Why is it that people are insisting Sanders is a communist (as exemplified by the former USSR)?
After all, have you compared the former USSR to what Sanders is proposing? If so, please explain to me how his proposals correlate with the former USSR.
IceMan, CometRider, Sean, Goodtime Charlie, Beast of the East, MonsterMash, et. al.
The question on the table is: what are the policies/positions proposed by Sanders that correlate with those of the former USSR?
The former USSR's defining characteristics were:
Now map Sanders' positions to this. When you fail to do so, try instead to map his positions to social democracy.
The defining characteristics of social democracy are:
See the Nordic nations since they are Sanders' prime examples of what he is talking about.
Let's discuss this in concrete terms rather than mere labels and slogans.
By the way, I am NOT a Sanders supporter. Although I think he genuinely has good intentions, I find his approach to be irrational and it would fail (but would never get off the ground anyway).
So when you can't have a discussion, throw up a pic of Stalin with a witty(not) blurb.
The Stalin pic was posted five hours ago in response to comment 7.2
There is nothing in 7.2 that makes sense with that pic.
The Russian Trolls’ Next Favorite Candidate
Americans don’t need Russia’s polarizing influence operations. They are plenty good enough at dividing themselves.
KATHY GILSINAN FEBRUARY 20, 2020Updated at 6:06 p.m. ET on Friday, February 21.
“Please move.” The white woman doesn’t raise her voice; she’s got her shirt on inside out and she’s aiming a cellphone at the taco-truck vendors parked on her street. She wants them gone, and they’re telling her to go back inside. “Okay, baby girl,” she says. “ Vamonos . I’ll call ICE.” “ Stupida bitcha ,” comes a reply.
A video of the confrontation, filmed outside a house in Dallas last spring, soon went viral, with the title “racist woman talking about shes gonna call ICE ON US FOR SELLING FOOD IN DALLAS WHEN WE HAVE PERMIT.” Within weeks, it had more than 170,000 views.
This is the new face of Russian propaganda. In 2016, the Kremlin invested heavily in creating memes and Facebook ads designed to stoke Americans’ distrust of the electoral system and one another. Now, after nearly four years under a president whose divisive rhetoric and policies have inflamed voter anger on issues such as race, inequality, and his own conduct, the Russian government is still interfering, but it doesn’t need to do much creative work anymore. The taco-truck video wasn’t fabricated in some St. Petersburg workshop. It was a real video of a real incident, made in America—and all Russia had to do was help it spread with its Twitter trolls.
Luckily for the Russians, then, the two current front-runners for the presidency, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are both polarizing figures—and they’re both candidates Russian trolls sought to promote in 2016, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller found . This time, the Democratic field is crowded and squabbling, but it includes no hawkish, long-established Hillary Clinton to tear down. If the election does end up being a Trump-Sanders face-off, one of the Kremlin’s favored candidates from 2016 is guaranteed a win. They are far apart ideologically but nearly equally suited to the Kremlin’s interests, both in being divisive at home and in encouraging U.S. restraint abroad. Both Sanders and Trump profess to want to refocus the U.S. inward—a message that clearly appeals to many Americans. But that doesn’t mean the Russian propaganda machine is slowing down; it’s just aimed at a new target.
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Read: The Sanders doctrine
Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who has studied Russian information operations, told me, “Systems like this don’t tend to stop simply because their reason for being no longer exists. They find new reasons for being.” In this case, building on their 2016 successes and worsening divisions in the United States.
Linvill offered me a list of reasons the Kremlin still wants to interfere in U.S. politics, despite the fact that we’re already doing such a great job of dividing ourselves. Russia’s goals include depressing voter turnout and making it more difficult for the eventual winner to govern by sowing doubts about the electoral process.
The Kremlin might also still have a preference for Trump, if only because Russian leaders now know what to expect from him, Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me. The New York Times reported after we spoke that intelligence officials told lawmakers, in a briefing last week, that Russia is indeed interfering to help Trump again. The report did not specify exactly how. Then came reports that U.S. officials had briefed Sanders that Russia was interfering on behalf of his campaign—Sanders said that Putin should “stay out of American elections,” in keeping with his position since 2016.
No matter what, Polyakova said, “a U.S. that’s mired in its own domestic problems and not engaged in the world benefits Moscow.” That’s where the videos come in.
Americans are now the chief suppliers of the material that suspected Russia-linked accounts use to stoke anger ahead of U.S. elections, leaving Russia free to focus on pushing it as far as possible. Linvill has seen Russian trolls shift tactics to become “curators more than creators,” with the same goal of driving Americans apart. “The Russians love those videos,” he said, “because they function to make us more disgusted with one another.” He and a colleague have traced viral tweets about the Dallas incident to Russia-linked accounts that Twitter has since suspended.
Read: The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president
America’s largely self-inflicted political condition has provided a stunning return on investment for the Russian government, which began orchestrating—as far back as 2014—what Mueller later called a conspiracy of “fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes,” including the 2016 presidential election. Mueller laid bare the extent of the conspiracy led by a St. Petersburg–based organization called the Internet Research Agency. The IRA was the nerve center of the interference operation; it had hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars dedicated to what it internally referred to as “information warfare” against America, with Facebook ads, fake Twitter personas, and even efforts to organize real-world protests.
Meanwhile, the irony is that the specter of Russian interference itself has become a tool to discredit political enemies online. “The biggest effect that I think foreign disinformation has had on our conversations is the perception that if someone disagrees with you, they’re a Russian troll,” Linvill said. “When, in fact, they probably just are somebody that disagrees with you.” Twitter, for instance, at one point suspended an account supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement as a suspected Russian troll. Wired later identified the user: an American living in Florida.
The IRA was already setting up fake social-media accounts and sending operatives to the United States two years before the 2016 election. It operated English-language Twitter accounts that circulated made-up news stories—about a salmonella outbreak in New York, for instance, and a chemical explosion in Louisiana, neither of which had happened, Linvill said. These days, Russian internet operatives barely deal in outright fabricated news stories, he said, and those early efforts failed because they were easily debunked. When the campaign started, the IRA wasn’t focused on supporting any particular candidate so much as targeting Clinton. This meant boosting not only Trump ( by establishing Facebook accounts such as “Clinton FRAUDation” and “Trumpsters United”) but also, incongruously, Sanders. (A BuzzFeed investigation found one Russian Tumblr account, 4mysquad, that posed as a black activist and celebrated Sanders as “not some old White man who just decided that #BlackLivesMatter yesterday. He’s BEEN fighting.”) Mueller later found that the clear preference for Trump developed over time.
Read: The Russian conspiracy that won’t die
Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of some IRA operatives—which meant little, since they were in Russia, beyond the reach of American law, and turning their attention to the 2018 midterm elections. The organization was still creating memes, and it got an even bigger budget, according to Graham Brookie, the director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. But it also began using more of what Americans themselves were putting on the internet, seizing on divisive debates about immigration, gun control, and police shootings of unarmed black men, using real news stories to highlight genuine anger and dysfunction in American politics.
Now, in 2020, the president and his political rivals have spent years locked in battle over things such as the Mueller investigation, impeachment, and America’s very institutions and role in the world. Russian trolls can largely just watch Americans fight among themselves, and use fictitious Twitter personas to offer vigorous encouragement, as they did with the taco-truck video. They will keep prodding the same bruises in American society, or encouraging cries of electoral fraud if there’s a contested Democratic primary or a tight general election.
The U.S. doesn’t need Russians to erode faith in its elections—one buggy app at the Iowa caucus did that just fine, prompting the president’s campaign manager to wonder on Twitter whether the caucus had been “rigged.” Trump is both a cause and an effect of existing American lack of faith in institutions, which he encourages with frequent reference to the “deep state.” And Sanders gets authentic support for his criticism of political and economic elites, which the Russia-linked accounts also promote.
Even as the U.S. by virtue of its political divisions has made Russia’s job easier in some ways, it has made Russian operations more difficult in others. The Mueller investigation and congressional scrutiny have made people more aware of Russia’s activities since 2016, Brookie said. Social-media companies such as Twitter and Facebook have grown more active at suspending suspicious accounts—even to the point of accidentally suspending real people spreading polarizing messages.
Still, although Brookie didn’t want to understate the threat of Russian interference, he maintained that American domestic disinformation is worse than anything the IRA could do. Of the Russians at this point, he said: “They could spike the football and say, ‘Mission accomplished.’”
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Apparently Putin's Troll Army, The Internet Research Agency, is conniving to get Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination but not because the Russians support Bernie's platform. Nope, the Russians desperately want Bernie to be the nominee because they know he will be the easiest for Trump to beat. The Russians support Trump and want him to face the weakest opponent.
What does it say that our enemies support Trump?
Stalin has been dead 75 years? All that cold war bullshit is stupid in modern context. It is mere propaganda. Bernie Sanders is not cut from the cloth of tyrants and dictators butt Trump surely is.
There's not much to be done for it, I'm afraid. Lots of political ads - most, probably - are full of crap to some degree. That's why you hope voters are paying attention and getting as educated as they can about the candidates. Unfortunately, the reality will still be that people cast votes for all sorts of ridiculous reasons.