Rapid response team
I didn’t realize the Russian trolls had pounced on the Florida shooting that fast. The Times reported a couple of days ago:
One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.
An hour.
So not only do we have a brain-fryingly stupid politics around issues such as gun control and abortion and women’s claim to be actual people, but also the brain-frying stupidity of our politics is like rotting meat to flies. We get the authentic stupid politics and then we get even more of it courtesy of Putin.
That is not fair.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”
Almost?
Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.
Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.
They find us stupid and they make us stupider. And Trump, of course, is gold for them.
Facebook, Google and Twitter have, to varying degrees, announced new measures to eliminate bot accounts, and have hired more moderators to help them weed out disinformation on their platforms.
But since the election, the Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag, which referred to a secret House Republican memorandum that suggested the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused their authority to obtain a warrant to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. The debate over the memo widened a schism between the White House and its own law enforcement agencies.
…
Intelligence officials in the United States have warned that malicious actors will try to spread disinformation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. In testimony to Congress last year and in private meetings with lawmakers, social media companies promised that they will do better in 2018 than they did in 2016.
But the Twitter campaign around the Parkland shooting is an example of how Russian operatives are still at it.
All so that oligarchs can get even more oligarchy.
Although the risk of nuclear Armageddon has diminished I wonder if Putin’s Russia is in some ways more dangerous to the West than the Soviet Union ever was.
Trump is all gold. Gilt to turd degree.
Lost the link, but today there was news that an inside leaker on Petersburg trol faktory to Western news channels, giving interviews, was beaten up outside his home after one of the few (obv!) oligarchs (“Putin’s chef”, head of the troll kitchen) had online publicly doxxed a number of opponents. Also took about an hour. Imagine. Remember Anna Politkovskaya?
Interesting that the Russian bots would promote pro-gun-control messages.
It seems that previously, the Russian bots would promote right-wing messages. In keeping with that, you’d expect them to be promoting “the libruls will use this to come for your guns” and “false flag” messages.
However, that was when they were working in the shadows, and hadn’t really been noticed or taken seriously by the powers that be. Now, people are on the lookout for the bots and their activities, and the bots appear to have changed tactics to promote the left-wing messages. I wonder if that’s a coincidence, or whether the bots are now counting on being discovered, and are “openly” promoting left-wing messages to give the US right-wing media another divisive bogeyman to use in the US-internal culture wars.
I would not like to put money against the possibility that sometime in the next few days, we’ll see stories that try to claim that students aren’t organising gun-control protests on their own, or because of Soros, but because they’ve been tricked into doing it by Russian botnets.
It will certainly make it harder to say, yes, the Russian botnets are promoting this thing, and it’s wrong that they’re doing that, but we should do the thing anyway because it’s actually a good idea, and no I’m not a Russian stooge, why won’t you believe me?
“…but we should do the thing anyway because it’s actually a good idea…”
To paraphrase an editorial cartoon originally about global warming:
What if it’s all a hoax and we create safer schools for nothing?”
I don’t know, Karellen, it seems they might be working both sides. After all, their goal is divisiveness, so they could maximize that by playing on both sides at once.