Twitter suspends account that helped ignite controversy over viral encounter (Covington)

[orangecrush]

(Altered Video of Students/Native American was likely Information Warfare)

"Late on Friday, the account posted a minute-long video showing the now-iconic confrontation between a Native American elder and the high school students, with the caption, "This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March."
That version of the video was viewed at least 2.5 million times and was retweeted at least 14,400 times, according to a cached version of the tweet seen by CNN Business.
The video shared by @2020fight did not show what preceded the confrontation between the Native American elder and the high school students.

The video had been posted earlier on Instagram by someone who was at the event, but it was @2020fight's caption that helped frame the news cycle.
Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at Storyful, a service that vets content online, was monitoring Twitter activity on Saturday morning and said the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.
In one indicator of the @2020fight's video's virality, multiple newsrooms, including some national American outlets, reached out to the user asking them directly about the video.
McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its "high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else's image in the profile photo."
Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher who saw the tweet and shared it herself on Saturday, said she later realized that a network of anonymous accounts were working to amplify the video.
Speaking about the nature of fake accounts on social media, McKew told CNN Business, "This is the new landscape: where bad actors monitor us and appropriate content that fits their needs. They know how to get it where they need to go so it amplifies naturally. And at this point, we are all conditioned to react and engage or deny in specific ways. And we all did."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/tech/twitter-suspends-account-native-american-maga-teens/index.html

[oberliner]

1. This article explains a lot

[orangecrush]

2. polarizing

Comes right from Moscow's playbook.

[ucrdem]

3. Well if the point was to change the narrative it succeeded wildly

Going into the weekend it was all about Trump's failed wall and the plight of unpaid federal workers. Coming out it was all about a picture of a high school kid in a red baseball cap. Hard to believe that one dumb grin could change the course of history but that appears to be the case.

[underpants]

4. I don't see it that way.

The MAGA hat crowd doubled down on Trump's horrific streak recently. Yes the media is bending over backwards to muddy the waters as a way of clearing things up for these kids but regardless of excuses these are clearly Trump's people.