Russian trolls hit Reddit, too

/r/politics flipped right after the DNC convention. Filled quickly with rabid pro-Hillary accounts, and any voice critical of her candidacy was quickly silenced with a flood of down votes and horribly formulated arguments and claims

The account is created on October 14th, 2015. Posts dogs and cats to relevant channels, then posts political articles from a dead domain (butthis.com). But two months later the account goes dark. Looking at what other posts (and their subreddits) posted this domain [1] I can't help but think this is suspicious.

Then I see the four TESTING posts at the bottom of the list, all on July 1st 2015. They even use TESTING URLs of butthis.com, and no other posts are made from an earlier date. Every account that posted one of these TESTING posts is also banned in the same way as the OP's account.

One of those TESTING post accounts [2] left a little russian in his links too [3].

I would be very interested in seeing these accounts' upvote/downvote history.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/domain/butthis.com/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/user/ser005

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/test/comments/3ayiwh/test_post/

There is no hard evidence. This is the nature of the game. First of all how do you even suppose evidence could be procured? What form would this "evidence" have? Claims by partisan authority figures, like the media or politicians? Is that evidence? No. There is no evidence.

You have to make judgments based on your own perception and what you think is plausible, all the while being aware that your own perception is biased, by your preconceived understanding of the world, and also your perception is also actively manipulated by those who you are trying to assess.

With regards to the topic at hand I think what the GP claimed is plausible, Russian propaganda does exist, but also our politicians are now going to use this excuse every time there is legitimate discontent.

For example: a story broke out some weeks ago about Russian shills, shilling against the controversial Keystone Pipeline. This is usually not a right-wing political position. Those who stand to make a lot of money from the pipeline immediately tried to discredit all the opposition to the pipeline as Russian trolling.

Hi "agent from Malaysia".

It is well known that "Correct The Record" has been influencing the discussions and votes. In the beginning it was easy to identify them, because they just copy-pasted political statements. They were very active during the primary elections. In some subreddits we had discussions whether there were any people at all on reddit that were in support of H. That was how popular Bernie was, and partially still is on reddit.

There also military level manipulations going on directly from military bases, and also manipulations by some Israeli agencies. Also the UK has active agencies, but they seem more subtle.

And then we have manipulations by companies that want to support their product (or favourite politician). There are even click-farms that you can pay to work for you, and companies specialized in manipulating social media (as Correct the Record).

And we have groups that work together to get upvotes and downvote unwanted posts. We usually call this "brigading", and while it is forbidden, this is also very common on reddit.

In 24 hours you can see the upvotes switch between soccer and football. Each nation has its own favourites and opinions. And I think that this is a good thing. We as different nations learn to communicate with each other.

Compared to all the manipulating going on, the manipulations of "Russian bots" is not much. And as far I have seen the influence, it is really overhyped. Frankly, if you really want to destabilize the US, you can do that by letting the internal political corruption bring it to the ground.

By communicating on the other hand, besides all bots and trolls, we can learn to see problems and solutions of our and other nations. See many different sides of problems and politics. This can be beneficial to all nations. (Even Malaysia ;-)

I did not say the intelligence services do not have any burden of proof. Their claims absolutely require evidence that can stand up to scrutiny. I'd say they even require harder evidence because of the history you mention.

You can say their claims are unsubstantiated, or if they have provided evidence then you can provide counterarguments against it. But accusations like 'intelligence propaganda' need proof as well.