538: Who Is In The Top 5 of Anti-Trump Senators? Yes, Corey Booker. [View all]

[TomCADem]

538 keeps a running tally of how often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president. Looking on this board, you are starting to see a series of threads claiming that Corey Booker is a Trump ally who is supportive of his agenda. Yet, Booker's record is clear. He is among the five most anti-Trump Senators in the Senate based on 538's Trump Score. Of course, Booker has also consistently voted against most of Trump's nominees. Most actual liberals and progressives who actually review a Democrats record would see this.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/

However, we need to be aware of posts that simply repeat or recite talking point attacks. The trolls are not going to wait until the eve of the 2018 or 2020 elections to attack. If you see posters who spend most of their posts attacking Democrats from the "left," while giving Trump and his Republican co-conspirators a free pass, then you need to be vigilant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.b9b0c045f574

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.