@gjohnsit
As I read the excerpt, I recalled something my son recently told me about "doing a raid on 4chan" with a couple of friends. They jam the page with so many shit comments like 'This is the FBI' or some such, that the other users can't post the content they were posting about, prior to the raid. He and friends are late teens/20ish.

But then I got to the end:

These kinds of digital insurgencies are being used by a growing number of actors to manipulate the way that the public has conversations online.

Sound familiar to anyone who's ever been on dkos or reddit? Donuts and bojos at dkos and Thumb has complained here about it shutting down the convo at the r/wayofthebern subreddit.

We all know that kos is a tool. More ways than one, for sure! And we saw it in real time, but now it's been officially acknowledged. Scum bags.

terrorists

When ISIS was employing techniques to jam conversations into social media, conversations that were elevated in the American press, we started trying to figure out how they were pushing their message. I did a little work for the Brookings Institution, which led to some work as a data science advisor to the State Department — developing counterterrorism strategies and understanding what public discourse looks like online and the difference between mainstream communication and what that looks like when it’s been hijacked.

The same mechanics and tactics used by ISIS are now being used by much more sophisticated actors, from hostile governments to kids who are coordinating activity on the internet to undermine things they don’t like for cultural reasons. They’ll take Black Lives activists and immigration-focused conservatives and amplify their discord, for example. We’ve also seen alt-right supporters on 4chan undermine movie releases. These kinds of digital insurgencies are being used by a growing number of actors to manipulate the way that the public has conversations online.

We realized we could use the same ideas and tech to defend companies that are vulnerable to these attacks. Energy companies, financial institutions, other companies managing critical infrastructure — they’re all equally vulnerable. Election manipulation is just the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the degradation of our discourse.

"Defend companies" from negative public opinion???

@Anja Geitz  
Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. — it’s all applied psychology in action.

How Google Marketers Exploit Your Discomfort

How Google Tracks Your Personal Information

The company's whose profits are destroying our world will most certainly have to "redefine" our First Amendment Rights before they actually strangle them to death online.

Election manipulation is just the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the degradation of our discourse.

Cue the time machine back to the political pamphleteer and the acres of land we will have to carve out in the future to survive.

@snoopydawg

why these people are so contemptuous of us. They are the Masters of the Universe and we are the flies in the ointment. I actually pity their hubris as well as their final days on this earth. A moment, I'm sure, that will be filled with authenticity and meaning. What a fucking way to live and die.

Ten years ago this month, days after the most sweeping left electoral mandate in 40 years, here's who Barack Obama put in charge of the U.S. government:

Rahm Emanuel
Hillary Clinton
Robert Gates
Timothy Geithner
Larry Summers
Eric Holder
Arne Duncan https://t.co/2EnZ9TNuKy

— Matt Karp (@karpmj) December 22, 2018

The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton

What John Podesta’s emails from 2008 reveal about the way power works in the Democratic Party.

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

... The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

...Many liberal pundits have talked about the need to focus exclusively on Donald Trump, and the existential threat he presents, in the critical period before Election Day. And there is a logic to that idea: Trump would legitimately be a terrifying leader of the free world. But there are consequences to the kind of home-team political atmosphere that rejects any critical thought about your own side. If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors. And if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late.

Who gets these cabinet-level and West Wing advisory jobs matters as much as policy papers or legislative initiatives. It will inform executive branch priorities and responses to crises. It will dictate the level of enforcement of existing laws. It will establish the point of view of an administration and the advice Hillary Clinton will receive. Its importance cannot be stressed enough, and the process has already begun.

This is a fight over who dominates the Democratic Party’s policy thinking in the short and long term. In 2008 the fight was invisible and one-sided, and the fix was in.

Whew! Looks like we sure dodged the bullet when Obama was elected instead of Hillary. And again when Trump won instead of her.