How is this any worse than Reddit admins "trolling" Reddit, e.g. undetectably changing users' comments?!
But yeah, an entire organization funded by a foreign government to subvert Western civilization and democracy does not compare to a single modified comment.
Second, silently misattributing words to people (he went behind the site's back, into the database, so the "comment edited" star never appeared) is not a "prank", it's a serious breach of trust, unprecedented in the history of the site, and calls into question anything anyone has ever written. If I remember right, this was only ever proven because archive snapshots of the comments pre-edit existed.
If someone familiar with Reddit history now is ever called to legally account for their comments, Reddit Inc. now gets to be called and has to prove they didn't screw with the posts. Can you say liability exposure? Sheesh.
There are some lines you just don't cross. If Huffman would edit people's comments on the sly for funsies, it shows he has no professional ethics that would prevent him from doing the same thing in a more important situation. What's to say he hasn't already in the matter of some other litigation we're not aware of?
More generally it's very common for forums to have a post edited by mods/admin, usually the edit will show up but if you mess with them they may be tempted to hit back and forget to set the "changed by xxxx" flag.
It's certainly interesting that the number of Russians discovering r/funny increased by an order of magnitude in the run up to the election. And that Putin found r/gifs so entertaining that he hired thousands of Russians to post on it and similar places. Don't you think?
Sure, in another universe where we didn't already know this stuff is a coordinated effort to destabilize our political system...
Yes, no one denied that. Its part of the equation, the russians are doing it yes, but so is everyone else (the US especially)... Im am pretty sure there are even assets in the services of Luxembourg, that have this task. It has been done in the past and will be done in the times to come. Disinfo campaigns are only a media topic right now, not because they are targeting the US (this has been done before), but because they are somewhat successful.
>> which is a hostile.action
Oh please, don't overreact. These campaigns are mean, divisive and unfair, but in the end they are -- in essence -- just words. Escalating them to a level of bellicosity is neither nessesary nor merited.
>> How successful they have been is incredibly difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
They are somewhat successful (not utterly of course), because there are wide fracture lines in the US society, that are not getting enough attention. If less people would feel disenfranchised and unrepresented -- left and right, native and immigrant, black and white -- These campaigns wouldn't be very effective.
So in conclusion the only dangerous thing in that election is the fact that Trump could be blackmailed. And Hillary can't be blackmailed?
Hilarious.
-- thanks for the downvotes.
Out of all those 17, the biggest idiot won, and now you want to take away the best excuse for this fracas that the elites have come up with?
I think the fact that the orange one is an idiot is pretty dangerous in and of itself, completely independent of however easy he is to be manipulated.