#influence campaigns

[kenyatta]

Last week, I noted that a particular talking point about the Hawaii wildfires — specifically, one that used the phrase “Hawaii, not Ukraine” to pressure the Biden administration to send relief funds to Hawaii instead of Ukraine — was gaining traction on Twitter and appeared to have been the product of a narrative that was initially seeded with inauthentic activity. The narrative, which started on Aug. 9 with a tweet from a low-follower account created in July 2023, was quickly picked up by a network of right-wing influencers and became so voluminous that it showed up in the results of nearly every Hawaii-related hashtag or trending keyword. The purpose of the campaign was clearly to promote divisiveness and make people think that the U.S. was neglecting Hawaii while sending continuing aid to Ukraine — with the ultimate goal of undermining public support for providing continued assistance to Ukraine. It’s all based on a false narrative, as I explain later, but before we get into that, let’s look at the coordinated activity driving it.

[afloweroutofstone]

If you've ever been reading your social media feed and suddenly noticed that conservative personalities have latched on to some obscure issue they’ve never cared about before, it may well be that they’re secretly getting paid to do it.

Back in 2013, a host of writers—including future Federalist cofounder Ben Domenech—suddenly all became passionate about rival Malaysian political factions. Surprise: they were receiving hefty payoffs from the Malaysian government.

Last year, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and some of the right’s other big-time YouTubers kept pumping out glossy videos for a new site called Tenet Media. It turned out to be a Kremlin operation. They were on the payroll to the tune of millions of dollars each, though they insisted they didn’t know where the money was coming from.

So I watched with interest last week when a host of MAGA types, including comedian Chad Prather, prolific X user Ian Miles Cheong, and Florida pro-Trump personality Eric Daugherty all started, seemingly at random, to defend the right of food-stamp recipients to buy soda.

The posts appeared to be in response to the movement under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” banner to get legislatures in states like Idaho and Arizona to pass bills that would ban food-stamp recipients from spending that money on soft drinks or other junk foods. The movement has been received well on the right, where the idea of restricting poor people from buying junk food with welfare benefits is an easy sell.

But then, last week, a wave of MAGA types started to take the pro-soda position. In similarly worded posts, Cheong, Prather, Daugherty, popular MAGA meme account “Clown World,” and other X users with big followings said it was unfair for the government to tell recipients how to spend their food-stamp money...

It’s not like these people were previously big soda fans, either. Cheong—a Malaysian citizen who has become fluent in inane American culture war issues through fights in video-game forums—said just a few years ago that Coca-Cola wants Americans “fat and addicted to sugar.”

But there Cheong was, on Thursday, writing on X that he opposed the government “curbing Diet Coke purchases.” For emphasis, he attached a picture of Trump guzzling Diet Coke on a golf course.

The first indication that something was afoot came on Friday, when Blake Marnell, an online pro-Trump anchor who goes by “Brick Suit” (he wears a suit that looks like border-wall bricks), posted comparisons of the pro-soda tweets authored by MAGA influencers, illustrating what appeared to be some sort of coordinated campaign. The attention grew after Turning Point USA’s Riley Gaines claimed on X that she’d been offered money to oppose the soda bills that had earned praise from RFK Jr. She said that she’d turned the cash down.

Conservative sleuths claimed the campaign came from Influenceable, a social-media startup aimed at getting Gen-Z influencers to promote companies’ messaging. One sleuth, Nick Sortor, posted documents purporting to be from Influenceable that laid out talking points for the pro-soda campaign and how influencers could claim money for posting the messages...

In 2023, right-wing website Current Revolt posted documents claiming to show Influenceable payment offers in exchange for social-media posts backing embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And last week brought us another difficult-to-decipher episode when Cheong, “Clown World,” and other right-wing influencers got inexplicably passionate about opposing a Texas Senate electric-grid regulation bill that otherwise received little coverage.

[alwaysbewoke]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The largest campaign finance violation in US history

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Earlier this month, some of the richest men in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (the billionaire VCs behind Andreesen-Horowitz) announced that they would be backing Trump with endorsements and millions of dollars:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/07/16/trump-lands-more-big-tech-backers-billionaire-venture-capitalist-andreessen-joins-wave-supporting-former-president/

Predictably, this drew a lot of ire, which Andreesen tried to diffuse by insisting that his support "doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations

In other words, the billionaires backing Trump weren't doing so because they supported the racism, the national abortion ban, the attacks on core human rights, etc. Those were merely tradeoffs that they were willing to make to get the parts of the Trump program they do support: more tax-cuts for the ultra-rich, and, of course, free rein to defraud normies with cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes.

Crypto isn't "money" – it is far too volatile to be a store of value, a unit of account, or a medium of exchange. You'd have to be nuts to get a crypto mortgage when all it takes is Elon Musk tweeting a couple emoji to make your monthly mortgage payment double.

A thing becomes moneylike when it can be used to pay off a bill for something you either must pay for, or strongly desire to pay for. The US dollar's moneylike property comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people need dollars to pay off the IRS and their state tax bills, which means that they will trade labor and goods for dollars. Even people who don't pay US taxes will accept dollars, because they know they can use them to buy things from people who do have a nondiscretionary bill that can only be paid in dollars.

Dollars are also valuable because there are many important commodities that can only – or primarily – be purchased with them, like much of the world's oil supply. The fact that anyone who wants to buy oil has a strong need for dollars makes dollars valuable, because they will sell labor and goods to get dollars, not because they need dollars, but because they need oil.

There's almost nothing that can only be purchased with crypto. You can procure illegal goods and services in the mistaken belief that this transaction will be durably anonymous, and you can pay off ransomware creeps who have hijacked your personal files or all of your business's data:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

Web3 was sold as a way to make the web more "decentralized," but it's best understood as an effort to make it impossible to use the web without paying crypto every time you click your mouse. If people need crypto to use the internet, then crypto whales will finally have a source of durable liquidity for the tokens they've hoarded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos

The Web3 bubble was almost entirely down to the vast hype machine mobilized by Andreesen-Horowitz, who bet billions of dollars on the idea and almost single-handedly created the illusion of demand for crypto. For example, they arranged a $100m bribe to Kickstarter shareholders in exchange for Kickstarter pretending to integrate "blockchain" into its crowdfunding platform:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html

Kickstarter never ended up using the blockchain technology, because it was useless. Their shareholders just pocketed the $100m while the company weathered the waves of scorn from savvy tech users who understood that this was all a shuck.

Look hard enough at any crypto "success" and you'll discover a comparable scam. Remember NFTs, and the eye-popping sums that seemingly "everyone" was willing to pay for ugly JPEGs? That whole market was shot through with "wash-trading" – where you sell your asset to yourself and pretend that it was bought by a third party. It's a cheap – and illegal – way to convince people that something worthless is actually very valuable:

https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1

Even the books about crypto are scams. Chris Dixon's "bestseller" about the power of crypto, Read Write Own, got on the bestseller list through the publishing equivalent of wash-trading, where VCs with large investments in crypto bought up thousands of copies and shoved them on indifferent employees or just warehoused them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

The fact that crypto trades were mostly the same bunch of grifters buying shitcoins from each other, while spending big on Superbowl ads, bribes to Kickstarter shareholders, and bulk-buys of mediocre business-books was bound to come out someday. In the meantime, though, the system worked: it convinced normies to gamble their life's savings on crypto, which they promptly lost (if you can't spot the sucker at the table, you're the sucker).

There's a name for this: it's called a "bezzle." John Kenneth Galbraith defined a "bezzle" as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." All bezzles collapse eventually, but until they do, everyone feels better off. You think you're rich because you just bought a bunch of shitcoins after Matt Damon told you that "fortune favors the brave." Damon feels rich because he got a ton of cash to rope you into the con. Crypto.com feels rich because you took a bunch of your perfectly cromulent "fiat money" that can be used to buy anything and traded it in for shitcoins that can be used to buy nothing:

https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/matt-damon-crypto-commercial/

Andreesen-Horowitz were masters of the bezzle. For them, the Web3 bet on an internet that you'd have to buy their shitcoins to use was always Plan B. Plan A was much more straightforward: they would back crypto companies and take part of their equity in huge quantities of shitcoins that they could sell to "unqualified investors" (normies) in an "initial coin offering." Normally, this would be illegal: a company can't offer stock to the general public until it's been through an SEC vetting process and "gone public" through an IPO. But (Andreesen-Horowitz argued) their companies' "initial coin offerings" existed in an unregulated grey zone where they could be traded for the life's savings of mom-and-pop investors who thought crypto was real because they heard that Kickstarter had adopted it, and there was a bestselling book about it, and Larry David and Matt Damon and Spike Lee told them it was the next big thing.

Crypto isn't so much a financial innovation as it is a financial obfuscation. "Fintech" is just a cynical synonym for "unregulated bank." Cryptocurrency enjoys a "byzantine premium" – that is, it's so larded with baffling technical nonsense that no one understands how it works, and they assume that anything they don't understand is probably incredibly sophisticated and great ("a pile of shit this big must have pony under it somewhere"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

There are two threats to the crypto bezzle: the first is that normies will wise up to the scam, and the second is that the government will put a stop to it. These are correlated risks: if the government treats crypto as a security (or worse, a scam), that will put severe limits on how shitcoins can be marketed to normies, which will staunch the influx of real money, so the sole liquidity will come from ransomware payments and transactions with tragically overconfident hitmen and drug dealers who think the blockchain is anonymous.

To keep the bezzle going, crypto scammers have spent the past two election cycles flooding both parties with cash. In the 2022 midterms, crypto money bankrolled primary challenges to Democrats by absolute cranks, like the "effective altruist" Carrick Flynn ("effective altruism" is a crypto-affiliated cult closely associated with the infamous scam-artist Sam Bankman-Fried). Sam Bankman-Fried's super PAC, "Protect Our Future," spent $10m on attack-ads against Flynn's primary opponent, the incumbent Andrea Salinas. Salinas trounced Flynn – who was an objectively very bad candidate who stood no chance of winning the general election – but only at the expense of most of the funds she raised from her grassroots, small-dollar donors.

Fighting off SBF's joke candidate meant that Salinas went into the general election with nearly empty coffers, and she barely squeaked out a win against a GOP nightmare candidate Mike Erickson – a millionaire Oxy trafficker, drunk driver, and philanderer who tricked his then-girlfriend by driving her to a fake abortion clinic and telling her that it was a real one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/14/competitors-critics-customers/#billionaire-dilletantes

SBF is in prison, but there's no shortage of crypto millions for this election cycle. According to Molly White's "Follow the Crypto" tracker, crypto-affiliated PACs have raised $185m to influence the 2024 election – more than the entire energy sector:

https://www.followthecrypto.org/

As with everything "crypto," the cryptocurrency election corruption slushfund is a bezzle. The "Stand With Crypto PAC" claims to have the backing of 1.3 million "crypto advocates," and Reuters claims they have 440,000 backers. But 99% of the money claimed by Stand With Crypto was actually donated to "Fairshake" – a different PAC – and 90% of Fairshake's money comes from a handful of corporate donors:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

Stand With Crypto – minus the Fairshake money it falsely claimed – has raised $13,690 since April. That money came from just seven donors, four of whom are employed by Coinbase, for whom Stand With Crypto is a stalking horse. Stand With Crypto has an affiliated group (also called "Stand With Crypto" because that is an extremely normal and forthright way to run a nonprofit!), which has raised millions – $1.49m. Of that $1.49m, 90% came from just four donors: three cryptocurrency companies, and the CEO of Coinbase.

There are plenty of crypto dollars for politicians to fight over, but there are virtually no crypto voters. 69-75% of Americans "view crypto negatively or distrust it":

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/

When Trump keynotes the Bitcoin 2024 conference and promises to use public funds to buy $1b worth of cryptocoins, he isn't wooing voters, he's wooing dollars:

https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-strategic-bitcoin-stockpile-bitcoin-2024/

Wooing dollars, not crypto. Politicians aren't raising funds in crypto, because you can't buy ads or pay campaign staff with shitcoins. Remember: unless Andreesen-Horowitz manages to install Web3 crypto tollbooths all over the internet, the industries that accept crypto are ransomware, and technologically overconfident hit-men and drug-dealers. To win elections, you need dollars, which crypto hustlers get by convincing normies to give them real money in exchange for shitcoins, and they are only funding politicians who will make it easier to do that.

As a political matter, "crypto" is a shorthand for "allowing scammers to steal from working people," which makes it a very Republican issue. As Hamilton Nolan writes, "If the Republicans want to position themselves as the Party of Crypto, let them. It is similar to how they position themselves as The Party of Racism and the Party of Religious Zealots and the Party of Telling Lies about Election Fraud. These things actually reflect poorly on them, the Republicans":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/crypto-as-a-political-characteristic

But the Democrats – who are riding high on the news that Kamala Harris will be their candidate this fall – have decided that they want some of that crypto money, too. Even as crypto-skeptical Dems like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester see millions from crypto PACs flooding in to support their primary challengers and GOP opponents, a group of Dem politicians are promising to give the crypto industry whatever it wants, if they will only bribe Democratic candidates as well:

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000190-f475-d94b-a79f-fc77c9400000

Kamala Harris – a genuinely popular candidate who has raised record-shattering sums from small-dollar donors representing millions of Americans – herself has called for a "reset" of the relationship between the crypto sector and the Dems:

https://archive.is/iYd1C

As Luke Goldstein writes in The American Prospect, sucking up to crypto scammers so they stop giving your opponents millions of dollars to run attack ads against you is a strategy with no end – you have to keep sucking up to the scam, otherwise the attack ads come out:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-31-crypto-cash-affecting-democratic-races/

There's a whole menagerie of crypto billionaires behind this year's attempt to buy the American government – Andreesen and Horowitz, of course, but also the Winklevoss twins, and this guy, who says we're in the midst of a "civil war" and "anyone that votes against Trump can die in a fucking fire":

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1813952816840597712/photo/1

But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto

But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:

https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/

At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:

Campaign finance law prohibits federal government contractors from making contributions, or promising to make contributions, to political entities including super PACs like Fairshake.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/federal-government-contractors/

Previous to this, the largest ever illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor appears to be Marathon Petroleum Company's 2022 bribe to GOP House and Senate super PACs, a mere $1m, only 4% of Coinbase's bribe.

I'm with Nolan on this one. Let the GOP chase millions from billionaires everyone hates who expect them to promote a scam that everyone mistrusts. The Dems have finally found a candidate that people are excited about, and they're awash in money thanks to small amounts contributed by everyday Americans. As AOC put it:

They've got money, but we've got people. Dollar bills don't vote. People vote.

https://www.popsugar.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-headquarters-climate-speech-47986992

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased

[morganaspendragonss]

polling day on thursday so this is your notice that if you actively choose not to vote, then you have no fucking right to complain about the way things turn out.

"but i don't want to go to the polling station!" you had plenty of time to apply for a postal or proxy vote.

"they're both the same!" 1. no they're fucking not. 2. this isn't the us. voting for the greens or the lib dems or snp or independent or count fucking binhead does mean something.

"but the prime minister will be rishi sunak or kier starmer!" yes, probably, but politics is not just national. you will be represented by somebody, i suggest you look at your local candidates.

democracy literally only works if people participate. go and fucking vote.

[littlebitofdnd]

Sandra-Lynn and Sklonda are having a "What Do We Do About Kristen" phone call as we speak

[helpimsleepdeprived]

in honour of national emo day

[fatedroses]

Mateus was a little creature when he was younger.

[acopytopy]

How much do civilians know about how trust value works?

I thought it was a bit redundant that Lin Ling would need it explained to him during episode 1. But what if he really didn’t know how it worked? It does seem like a glaring weakness—anyone could make a smear campaign against a hero and ruin their powers.

[thequeenofmyownscreen]

"I can help you win this war."

Oh, no.

bonus, the cast's reaction is just PRICELESS

[shrimpari]

“I made a pact with Vol, a pact of Blood”

Strahd von Zarovich and his very, very good friend.

[alwaysbewoke]

honestly, FUCK ISRAEL!!

[tinkgaskarth]

Whoever decided that the final TIT show and the critical role campaign 3 finale would be on the same day needs a STERN TALKING TO what am I supposed to do I can’t be DOUBLE insufferable I have WORK TODAY. Please. I can’t do this.

[boombox-fuckboy]

As a hobby worldbuilder who works primarily in what I assume is the weird fiction zone (with fair sized fantasy or scifi elements, depending on the project), I sometimes get stuck about what to do with the sky. If reality doesn't work the same, how do I account for the sun? Should I even have a moon and stars? If I do, are they true moon and stars, or an equivalent?

While you can gently sweep the conundrum under a rug, it can of course become part of the game. Here's some examples of solutions I've enjoyed:

Midst: The natural state of the universe is, in fact, light. Darkness acts like a reality-warping, breathable liquid. Midst is an islet, which here means it's one of many floating planetoids. Midst specifically floats and rotates slowly at the border of light and dark, causing day and night. The moon is an even smaller floating body, but it's mostly just there to explode. Space is dangerous not for breathing or temperature reasons but because you'll get ripped to shreds by floating mica.

Campaign: Skyjacks: The sun is the creation of the Sovereign (now dead patriarch god), and the stars were his angels. The Morningstar is the only one that doesn't move, guarding the empty throne, but the few remaining stars (angels) do, and also aren't always up there, which makes navigation difficult. There are so few stars now as most angels were cast out of the heavens a couple centuries back (when The Sovereign was slain). The moon was created by The Forest Queen, allowing her to see by the light of it, which she could not by the Sovereign's sun. If you fly an airship above the moon, she cannot see you.

The Mistholme Museum: Specifically, in the world of The Beast and The Queen, the stars are beetles, which roam about on the dome that is the sky. The sun? Different beetle.