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Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
@RVAwonk
Jan 18, 2018 • 10 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
The FBI is investigating whether Alexander Torshin, a top Russian banker (known as the "Russian godfather"), illegally funneled money to the NRA to help Trump win.

(The NRA spent $30 million to support Trump — 3X what they gave to Romney's 2012 campaign)

mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-wo…
<quick thread>
A bit of background info on Alexander Torshin, the Russian bank exec and suspected mobster/organized crime boss who is now being investigated for potentially funneling $ through the NRA to help Trump's campaign. (That's him at the 2016 NRA convention👇).

/1/ Image
According to intel assessments, Torshin is part of a years-long "aggressive Kremlin effort to forge alliances" w/top GOP figures, including those close to the WH. The NRA is a major conduit of influence here... and possibly also a cash conduit.

/2/
Trump was set to meet with Alexander Torshin in February before the National Prayer Breakfast. The meeting was canceled the night before when an NSC staffer blew the whistle and flagged Torshin as a potential Russian mobster...

/3/
In Nov., @NBCNews reported that Jared Kushner failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture & dinner invite" from Alexander Torshin.

Torshin wanted Trump to attend an event at the NRA's May 2016 convention in Louisville, KY.

/4/
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/k…
The undisclosed email chain suggested that Torshin "was seeking to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official during the NRA convention, and that he may have had a message for Trump from Putin."

/5/
Also in Nov., Don Jr admitted that he met with Torshin at a private dinner at the NRA's 2016 convention — just as Torshin requested in the (undisclosed) emails to Kushner (in which he said he wanted to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official).

/6/
Torshin and Trump have reportedly known each other since at least 2012. According to Bloomberg, the two "had a jovial exchange at the NRA convention in Tennessee in 2015."

...interesting how this keeps circling back to the NRA, isn't it?

/7/
Another key figure in the Torshin-NRA-Trump nexus: Torshin's "special assistant" Maria Butina, who attended one of Trump's first campaign events in April 2015 — during which Trump signaled his willingness to lift sanctions on Russia.

/8/
Here's Trump in 2015, suggesting to Maria Butina (Russian crime boss Alexander Torshin's special assistant) that he would lift sanctions on Russia.

"I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin... I don't think you'd need the sanctions."

/9/

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More from @RVAwonk

Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Oct 6
A viral claim emerged from pro-Trump Twitter on Friday, alleging that locals in NC had assaulted a FEMA director. By Saturday, it was a top Google trend. But it never actually happened.

Here’s how a fictional story ended in real threats of violence:
weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/how-a-viral-…Image
There were a lot of striking aspects of this story, but more than anything, this was among the clearest examples I’ve seen of how online storytelling can be used to motivate and guide offline violence through the reframing of political violence as a necessary act of survival. Image
The rumor first emerged on Friday, but really picked up steam later on Friday and into the early hours of Saturday AM, when it ranked among the top 10 Google searches. The initial tweet was retweeted 20,000+ times & got 100,000+ “likes” & 6.4 million views in the first 19 hours. Image
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Read 14 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Sep 24
He did. Trump & his allies spent years weaponizing the narrative around antifa in order to preemptively justify using violence and force to crack down on anyone who opposed Trump — thus paving the way for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on 1/6.
👉🏼
This went on for YEARS; I was one of very few people talking about it for a long, long time. It was in the works since at least 2017 (likely earlier) and it involved politicians, media, think tanks, govt officials, & more.

They’ll try again if they can.

Trump and his allies were so determined to get antifascists to come out and fight on 1/6 (to cause enough chaos to justify a militarized crackdown) that there was even a plan to have right-wing extremists impersonate antifascists, infiltrate 1/6 protests, and incite violence.
Read 4 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Sep 14
I wrote about cognitive warfare and how the contrived panic over Haitian immigrants hijacked our algorithms, our brains, and our national discourse.
weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/how-the-cont…
Image
During the 2-hr-long presidential debate this week, abortion was the top political topic searched in 49 states. The only exception was Ohio, where immigration was the top-searched issue — a trend driven by searches for topics related to the false claims about Haitian immigrants. Image
But despite being the top search topic in 49 states, abortion wasn’t the top search topic overall. Immigration — specifically, a false story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio — displaced abortion as the top search topic overall for nearly the entire 2-hour time window.
Read 10 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Sep 12
This was always the inevitable endpoint of the wildly false claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs & cats. As this person literally admits, it doesn’t matter to them if it’s factually true or not — it only matters that (to them) it *feels* like it *could* be true.


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It’s REALLY easy to get people to spread absurd lies about immigrants (or anyone else) if those people already believe terrible things about immigrants *and* are politically/ideologically motivated to persuade others to believe terrible things about immigrants.
We see this all the time; it’s one of the main reasons that fact-checking, at least on its own, so often fails — because people don’t believe lies & rumors simply based on the facts presented, but rather based on their own prior beliefs, motives, identity, emotions, and more. P
Read 8 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
May 28
The CEO of Google — one of the five largest tech companies in existence today — says he has no solution for the company’s AI providing wildly inaccurate information to users.

Astonishing that they didn’t address this before releasing the AI publicly.
futurism.com/the-byte/ceo-g…
We need a totally different incentive structure here. We shouldn’t celebrate companies for releasing things faster, or making the most dramatic changes to the status quo. Instead, we should reward those who prioritize rigorous safety testing & built-in guardrails.
Ultimately, the usefulness of AI tools is inherently contingent on being able to use them without producing new and bigger problems along the way. Companies that are rushing just to put things in users’ hands are not producing useful tech; they’re just trying to stay relevant.
Read 7 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Apr 27
This — IU changing a rule overnight & pretending they didn’t – is such a prescient example of why my biggest fear regarding AI is that it will be used to rewrite history and produce the “evidence trail” needed to make the fake version of history look more real than the real one.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking into this potentiality and it’s actually a lot easier to accomplish than it seems, which should absolutely terrify you. Of course, it would start small, with marginal changes to obscure events & records — so by the time you notice, it’s too late.
I mean, it *is* happening. It’s not just a hypothetical anymore. The only question is whether the AI-facilitated historical revisionism we’ve seen thus far is simply the product of errors or glitches, or if it’s intentional — ie, the AI doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Read 6 tweets

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