Russian trolls used concerns about police violence and voter fraud to simultaneously court and attack communities of color.
An indictment filed Friday by the special counsel to investigate Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election shows the lengths a Russian troll farm went to inflame racial tensions, operating several social accounts that intended to discourage African-Americans from voting in an election shaped largely by racial issues.
In all, 13 Russian nationals and three companies were formally accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. According to a 37-page document released Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller, Russian operatives working for the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency used several social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — including ones called “Woke Blacks” and “Blacktivists” — to urge Americans to vote for third-party candidates or sit out the election entirely.
“Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein,” one message read. “Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”
In other accounts targeting Trump supporters, operatives also allegedly stoked fears of voter fraud in the lead-up to the presidential election by pushing already debunked claims about the practice. These claims included the allegation that ineligible votes helped Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in Florida during the primary and that she stole the Iowa Caucus.
As Vox’s Jennifer Williams explains, the Friday indictment serves as the “federal government’s most detailed public description of just how far some Russians were willing to go to help Trump win the presidency — and of the kinds of tactics they could use to meddle in this fall’s midterm elections as well.”
But while the tactics outlined in the new indictment are expansive, they are not the first time that Russian manipulation of the rhetoric and concerns of people of color have come to light.
In January, research from the University of Washington found that Russian accounts actively used the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter, and keywords related to police shootings in an effort to appeal to both left-leaning and right-leaning individuals. Last fall, several media outlets reported on the ways that the Internet Research Agency and other groups sought to connect with African Americans and racial justice organizers, building upon a history of Russian groups targeting already existing racial divisions in the US.
In September, CNN reported that two different social media accounts under the handle “Blacktivists” were being used to connect with black audiences and “regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage.”
”Black people should wake up as soon as possible,” one post read, according to CNN. “Black families are divided and destroyed by mass incarceration and death of black men,” read another. CNN also reported that “the accounts also posted videos of police violence against African Americans.” At least one ad was specifically targeted to audiences in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, CNN reported.
When Russian media reported on the Internet Research Agency in October, additional reporting from US-based media outlets revealed a complex persuasion campaign. Reports from ThinkProgress and BuzzFeed focused specifically on a group called “BlackMattersUS,” a website with “over 200,000 followers and focused ‘mostly on racism and police brutality themes,’” according to BuzzFeed.
In addition to operating a website, BlackMattersUS also sought to build legitimacy by connecting with racial justice activists and by promoting already scheduled protests and events, as well as operating a podcast and creating a Tumblr account that included “descriptions of Hillary Clinton as ‘Satan’s daughter,’ ‘The root of all evil,’ and ‘Himmlery aka (‘Death for Dollars’) – ‘The Benghazi Bullshitter.’”
Micah White, a cofounder of Occupy Wall Street, told BuzzFeed he was contacted by the BlackMattersUS group in May 2016 through a man named Yan Big Davis, who claimed he was a freelance reporter looking to discuss activism:
Davis wrote to White requesting an interview. “We admire the job you did for the protest movement in the US,” he wrote in an email seen by BuzzFeed News.
When they spoke on the phone the following month, White said the connection sounded as if Davis was calling from a long distance. His accent sounded strange. He assumed he was probably speaking to an African man.
“The idea that he was a Russian was the furthest thing from my mind,” White told BuzzFeed News.
The questions Davis asked him in the interview also sounded different to him than the questions he routinely gets from reporters.
White told BuzzFeed that after BlackMattersUS ran a story based on the interview, Davis continued to reach out with more news stories that he hoped White would comment for. Other activists contacted by the account said that they thought it had some affiliation with Black Lives Matter.
Individual accounts reportedly connected to the group, such as one for a woman named Crystal Johnson, also sent out tweets that occasionally went viral. At one point, the Johnson account was even retweeted by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. The Johnson account infrequently sent stories containing falsehoods and disparaging remarks about Clinton, according to the Daily Beast.
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Breaking News: The Mueller indictment offers new details on how Russian trolls stoked racial tensions - News Paper
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