The ongoing results of Congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections is interesting but sometimes also a bit weird.
Many Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram accounts were operated by Internet Research Agency, a Russian-state-affiliated agency based out of St Petersburg.
TPartyNews
On of the Russian accounts, TPartyNews, published incendiary fake news and quotes on Black Live Matters and immigration, mixed with genuine retweets from other conservative outlets, and had tens of thousands of followers such as White House Adviser Sebastian Gorka.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/21/politics/tpartynews-twitter-russia-link/index.html
*Pokemon Go: Don’t Shoot Us”
Russia-backed campaign tried to combine the Tumblr community, Black Lives Matter, and Pokémon Go into some kind of perfect storm of manipulation, all in an attempt to piss off Trumpers so much that they’d be more likely to vote.According to a colorful rules page, the contest asked people to change the names of their monsters on Pokémon Go to the names of people who were killed by police. Then, they’d find a Pokémon Go gym close to where that person was killed, take over the gym, and leave this specific monster behind. Once they took a screenshot and sent it to this Tumblr page, they’d be entered to win an Amazon gift card. CNN doesn’t know what the point of this all was, but it seems like the idea was to manipulate left-leaning people into hijacking the game with a political message, which could in turn manipulate right-leaning people into getting angry and becoming more politically motivated.
The whole thing was partly exposed by attempts to break into the real world, which got actual activists to start questioning Don’t Shoot Us and looking into who was running it. Attempts to speak with the people behind the group turned up suspicious inconsistencies, and CNN says a glance at the metadata of a document that Don’t Shoot Us put together revealed some Russian words—which Clerk York, an American man living in a mall, probably wouldn’t do.
https://www.avclub.com/russia-used-pokemon-go-and-black-lives-matter-to-meddle-1819419718
BlackMattersUS
BlackMattersUS was another website set up by the Kremlin-affiliated agency. They hired Missouri rapper called “Rough The Ruler” to write and record a song for their website, describing police as assassins and protestors as avengers.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/russian-internet-trolls-sought-opt-unwitting-american-activists/story?id=50570832
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/russia-deceived-black-activists-into-aiding-their-election-interference-scheme/
Williams and Kalvin
According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund by the Muslim.”
These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences.
Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time.
It’s reminiscent of the Russian attempts to impersonate a California-based Muslim group and piggyback off of the Black Lives Matter protests to spread the Kremlin’s message. But this time, the Kremlin operation used real people, not just memes and hijacked hashtags.
The discovery of living, breathing, real-life avatars for Kremlin talking points deepens and complicates the emerging picture of how Russian propaganda reached what Facebook alone estimated last week were 10 million users in the United States—a number considered by many outside experts to be a lowball estimate.
That one’s worth checking out. Williams and Kalvin claim they are from Atlanta but they sound somewhat like someone born in Nigeria and raised in Minsk.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-recruited-youtubers-to-bash-racist-btch-hillary-clinton-over-rap-beats