What Next - Midterm Trolls - Online and Off
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
US Cyber Command launched its first cyber operation to deter Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections, but is it too late? Clint Watts, the author of Messing With the Enemy, "Oh yeah." Today on the show, the continued assault on our information space. Plus, the bomb scares that targeted high-profile Democrats.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's this woman named Louisa Haynes who I want to tell you about. |
| 0:05.2 | She went by the Twitter handle, Woke Louisa. |
| 0:08.3 | Her picture showed a young, pretty black woman. |
| 0:11.0 | And if you're frustrated by Donald Trump, |
| 0:13.0 | I got to say, her timeline was pretty funny. |
| 0:16.4 | Like when you were setting your clocks back for daylight savings time, |
| 0:19.5 | she tweeted, don't forget to delete one hour from the Trump presidency at 2 a.m. |
| 0:24.7 | It's not bad, right? She had opinions about policy, too. Trump wants to spend $25 million on a border wall, she tweeted at one point. |
| 0:33.5 | That money could be used to pay $192,000 porn stars to stay quiet. |
| 0:41.0 | Louisa was popular. |
| 0:42.6 | She had more than 50,000 followers. |
| 0:44.9 | Her hot takes on politics were picked up and reposted by the BBC, USA Today, Time magazine, and more. |
| 0:52.5 | But the thing with Louisa Haynes is that she wasn't real. |
| 0:59.8 | Louisa was dreamed up along with hundreds of other social media profiles by a group of |
| 1:04.2 | Russian digital operatives. They created Facebook profiles, they shared memes, and just last week, |
| 1:10.5 | the FBI accused them of trying |
| 1:11.8 | to influence the midterms. That's right, the election that's happening in just a couple |
| 1:16.5 | weeks. That's why digital security guru Clint Watts is here. He's going to tell me what U.S. |
| 1:22.8 | Cyber Command, which, yeah, that's a thing, can actually do about all this. Plus, the criminal complaint filed last week against a woman who allegedly worked for a Russian |
| 1:32.2 | troll farm. |
| 1:33.4 | What can that accountant tell us about how these schemes work? |
| 1:37.3 | All that and just a bit more news from the day after the break. |
... |
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