I think Russia is swaying municipal, county and state elections on social media.

Elections are now won or lost on social media.

That goes for Coatesville City Council elections too. 

Even if a voter doesn’t go near a network connected device, information that originated on Facebook can be passed by word of mouth. Facebook or some other social media is often the foundation of corporate media news stories.

Russians will be hitting municipal, county and state elections on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. And most people involved in those elections probably aren't checking.

Even local municipal candidates should monitor social media and try to see if bots from Russia are posting stuff that could affect their elections.  The FBI or any government agency can't possibly monitor everything. Political campaigns need to do the monitoring.

Elections are won or lost on social media and Russia is tuned in.

I started to get a doubling of page views on Coatesville Dems Blog around election times. I didn't begin to check until about April of 2016. Half of my Coatesville Dems Blog began to come from Russia & eastern countries near election times.

The page views from Russia went on and off like a switch. They didn't post, or comment, they were reading for information. My comments are filtered.

So 5000 page views per week and 2500 from Russia.

Last week, or 7 day period, there were zero page views from Russia. But right now Russia is reading my mostly all local blog. 

Right now more than 1/2 of all page views on CoatesvilleDems come from Russia. 

Look carefully at the screenshot from Coatesville Dems Blog "Pageviews by Countries" below.

We know Russia links with Alt-Right sites in the US. 

People (or intelligence gathering bots?) in foreign countries reading my blog right now are in France, Germany, UK and Poland. Those countries also have ultra right wing candidates. 

My blog is about local elections. And local ultra-right wing people and candidates. Read the thing at the top of my blog. It looks like Russia is now deeply involved in U.S. public corruption and U.S. ultra - right wing extremists. 

From the Guardian:

Hiding in plain sight: how the 'alt-right' is weaponizing irony to spread fascism

Jason WilsonTuesday 23 May 2017 06.00 EDT

the guardian

Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during US election 

“The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign…”  

The role of Russian generated fake news is a separate strand which has gained less attention up to now, but the part it played in depressing the Clinton vote in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the critical last days of the 2016 campaign could have helped change the course of recent American history.  

A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego,  said it really took off in March 2016.  

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.  

Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.  

Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.  

Mattes, a former Senate investigator, did some digging into the sudden phenomenon of eastern European Sanders enthusiasts. He found a spike in activity on the anonymous browsing tool Tor in Macedonia that coincided with the launch of the fake news campaign, which he believes could represent Russian handlers contacting potential east European hosts to help them set up automated websites.  

'This is a cost-effective hands-free method with no blowback to you if you are in St Petersburg creating this product,' Mattes said. He argued that if the pro-Sanders websites in east Europe had been primarily motivated by maximising clicks they would have moved on to another viral subject.  

'What I found was that 95% of them has gone dark,” he said. “So my question is: what are they hiding and why did they run as soon as the investigation began?' 

Mattes believes that the aim of the campaign was to damage Clinton, who Vladimir Putin saw as his arch foe, and then, after the primaries were over, to minimise the number of Sanders voters who switched their support to Clinton in the face-off against Trump…”  

“Clint Watts, a former FBI counter-terrorism expert, said that a Russia-driven influence campaign also became apparent in the Republican primaries.  

He told the Senate intelligence committee the campaign “may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed”.  

He saw the same pattern that Mattes had observed, of seemingly independent operators across Europe suddenly starting to propagate similar messages consistent with messaging from Moscow.  

“What you have to look at now is how were these sites financed and you have look at their ownership. How did they get the funds to get started?” said Watts, now a senior fellow at the Centre For Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.  

He has also found a high degree of apparent coordination in the dissemination of fake news between official Russian propaganda outlets and “alt-right” sites in the US.

Besides having blogs, I track domestic right wing politicos and potential right wing terrorists. JP

'They synchronise so quickly it looks as if they know when a particularly story was going to come out,' he added. 'And they all parrot the Kremlin narrative.”

MORE AT:
the guardian
Investigators explore if Russia colluded with pro-Trump sites during US election

Questions raised as to whether Trump supports coordinated with Moscow to spread bogus stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton

Julian BorgerLast modified on Wednesday 5 July 2017 11.25 EDT