#I've voted in every presidential election since 2004

[ms-demeanor]

making my own post because nobody needs my bullshit on their post:

OP:

Reblog 1:

Reblog 2:

My response:

The IRA blogs were here and they were active and they were quite popular; their posting patterns did not match normal tumblr users (i was followed by lagonegirl and followed back only to be put off by the account reblogging the same five or ten posts every hour for a day before selecting another five or ten posts to reblog hourly the next day - it was clear engagement bait).

Tumblr has never been as transparent about these accounts as both Twitter and Facebook were, but several of the accounts had shared names across platforms and you can find a significant amount of data that was released by both facebook (ex: ads purchased by the IRA accounts) and twitter (over three million tweets from IRA accounts). Academic researchers have published papers on the data released from facebook and twitter. Several papers. So many papers. Soooooo many papers. We have a LOT of direct evidence that you can explore for yourself that there were hundreds (possibly thousands) of IRA accounts that were created on Facebook and Twitter. Of those accounts, some shared usernames across platforms, and of those accounts, a few had tumblr accounts that posted the same content on twitter and tumblr.

To quote a buzzfeed news article from the time:

The Russian-run Tumblr accounts used the same, or very similar, usernames as the account names contained on a list of confirmed IRA accounts Twitter submitted to congressional investigators. In some cases, the Tumblr and Twitter account has the same profile image or linked to each other in their bios. Some IRA Tumblrs and Twitter accounts also cross-promoted content between platforms, further linking them together.

Current tumblr user @ alwaysbewoke (who I don't want to tag because I'm sure he's got better things to do) is interviewed in that article and talks about following one of the blogs identified by tumblr as an IRA blog that had a matching account on twitter identified as an IRA account but unfollowing when the left-leaning blog supposedly run by a black creator started rooting for trump in the election.

Dr. Jonathan Albright is heavily quoted in the article; the data review he collaborated on is one of the only reviews of this subject that includes data from Tumblr and Reddit.

One of the claims that I've seen is that tumblr just deleted funny black people, but these were blogs with thousands of followers on tumblr who never recreated, never popped up on another social media site, never started a reddit account after getting banned; nobody ever showed up saying "hey this is 4mysquad, I got banned on tumblr and twitter, follow me to pillowfort". These very popular blogs got deleted and, as far as I know, nobody ever popped up claiming to be a person who was deleted - and it's not like tumblr users haven't figured out how to evade bans.

What you are doing when you make posts saying that the IRA accounts on tumblr never existed is *absolving tumblr of guilt for their utter lack of transparency.*

Tumblr is not the only tech company that has tried to fly under the radar as its larger counterparts face regular scrutiny in Congress and in the press. Earlier this month, Reddit revealed it too had deleted hundreds of accounts with ties to the Internet Research Agency. A WIRED investigation found more than a thousand links to Russian propaganda websites are still live on Reddit, and unearthed two suspicious accounts that Reddit immediately shut down.

So should you believe what Tumblr says? No, because Tumblr has been functionally fucking silent on this issue and the information about this subject aside from the list of blogs has come from the hard work of data scientists, journalists, and researchers.

(For the record; some of those bot accounts that were recorded by Dr. Albright also had Google+ accounts in 2017 - there is every possibility that they had myspace accounts).

Now, the reason that I'm popping onto this post as an annoyed anarchist is that I was tracking a similar group of blogs for a while and was discussing them and I stopped precisely because of the galaxy-brained liberals who are now trying to dunk on communists for criticizing electoralism. One of the people who was following my project was one of the ones who started calling out the "joe biden kills dogs" posts as disinfo and I realized they were using some of the guidelines I'd written up to "identify" misinformation and that is very a rock fucking stupid approach to what was clearly a leftist making jokes and was horrified and realized there was no way that I could continue documenting what I was documenting without someone attempting to call actual leftists russian bots.

I've seen the post that OP is referencing [it's one where someone makes a very obvious joke about the democrat presidential ticket and people jump on to call them a bot and then someone tries to do the "AI tell me a story" thing and OP is just like "I don't want to :(", proving that they are in fact a person and not an AI] and have deeply enjoyed the humor of watching liberals a) not understand a very, VERY obvious joke and b) become the unwitting butt of a joke they were trying to make, but also I am so exhausted by watching normie dems call leftists AI bots after years of watching normie dems call real live actual leftists who hold actual political views that real people actually have, like prison abolition, russian bots.

But I am also so fucking tired of left conspiracism and how stupid it sounds when leftists dismiss a preponderance of evidence that is easily accessible and publicly available for analysis as "lol so you just trust everything tumblr tells you?"

No, dipshit, learn to click a fucking link or twelve.

[protoindoeuropean]

@erikag59

Oh yes, people are indeed generally quite surprised when they hear about a party forming 3 months before the elections and then winning.

But for us in Slovenia this "experimental" approach comes as no surprise, because that has already happened before ... twice

To bring out a graph I've already posted here before:

These are the results of the parliamentary elections since 1992, with the paries approximately ideologically arranged: the aquamarine of DeSUS serves as an approximate centrist dividing line between the left-leaning parties below it (DL is a notable centrist exception, but I liked its downward curve there lol) and right-leaning parties above it)

There's quite a mess in the bottom part of this graph. That is the left-leaning voting block, which has chosen to rally behind a different party in every consecutive election after 2008 – following the collapse of LDS, the OG centre-left party that ruled from 1992 to 2004 (with a short, half-year intermission in 2000), back in 2006~2007 – being dissapointed with the results each time:

PS, which won the most votes in 2011, was established a bit more than 2 months before the elections by Zoran Janković, the mayor of the capital Ljubljana (2006–2011, 2012– ). What followed was one of the weirdest sequences of events in Slovenian political history* (though definitely not the weirdest one).

SMC, which won the most votes in 2014, was established a bit more than 1 month before the elections by Miro Cerar, a highly respected legal scholar.

LMŠ, which didn't win even close to the most votes in 2018 (but ended up leading the government), was the party of the mayor of Kamnik, Marjan Šarec, who had worked as a political satirist before going into politics himself (most prominently, he was a famous imitator of Slovenian politicians – well, mostly:

). His national-level political project started a bit earlier as a surprisingly effective challenge to the incumbent Borut Pahor at the 2017 presidential elections (though the latter did end up winning), carrying that political potential into the 2018 parliamentary elections.

GS, which won the most votes in 2022, was, as mentioned, established 3 months before the elections by Robert Golob after Janša made him (practically out of nowhere) into his direct opponent (the the post in the link above).

So, the continual emergence of left-leaning parties at every election is not a surprise anymore at this point, it's a pattern. Which can be frustrating, but it does also mean that when people (especially in the foreign press) see the consistently high results of Janša's SDS and think that that means that party is going to win the next election, that's deceiving. Despite SDS's consistent results, we've only had right-wing governments for about 8 of the 33 years of independent Slovenia (1991–92, 2000, 2004–8, 2012–13, 2020–22).

*In 2011 Janković failed to form a coalition and we had to endure 1 year of Janša, before his govt collapsed and PS did eventually take over, with its then-president Alenka Braušek becoming PM – the Janša govt collapsed because of the opening of a corruption investigation regarding both Janša and Janković; Bratušek took over PS while the charges against Janković were being investigated. In a turn of events that are hard to conceive of, a year later, when the corruption commission didn't find anything, Janković challenged Bratušek for the presidency of the party, while she was the sitting prime minister of the country. She lost the party election, splintering the party in two, with a significant part of the PS membership (including Robert Golob, interestingly enough) following her in forming her own party (ZaAB, later SAB). In the process, she resigned as PM, triggering snap-elections. PS, which received 28.51% of the vote in 2011, failed to reach the 4% threshold in 2014 (literally decimating its support down to 2.97%), falling into obscurity, while ZaAB did get into parliament (barely, with 4.38%).

Bratušek was again successful with getting into parliament in 2018, before being swallowed up by Golob's GS in 2022 (quite literally: after its electoral failure, SAB – together with LMŠ – officially merged with GS in June 2022). She is currently the Minister of Infrastructure. Janković is still the mayor of Ljubljana.