'This is cultural hacking': How Russia harvested American rage to reshape US politics
YouTube videos of police beatings on United States' streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night.
All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the centre of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election...
One Russian Facebook page, the United Muslims of America, frequently posted content highlighting discrimination against Muslims. In June 2016, it posted a video originally made by Waqas Shah, 23, an online video creator from Staten Island, New York. In the video, Shah dressed in a thobe, a traditional ankle-length gown worn by Arab men, walked through New York City's Union Square, where he is shoved and harassed by another actor pretending to be a bully to see how bystanders react.
The video ends with Shah pointing out New York's hypocrisy: The city claims to be a "melting pot," but no one intervened while he was getting harassed. Shah's original video, posted on YouTube in June 2016, was a viral hit that attracted more than 3 million views. A week after he posted it, United Muslims of America copied the video to its group page without the original YouTube link, a process known as ripping. There, Shah's video became the Russian page's most popular post, earning more than 150,000 interactions...
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/north-america/this-is-cultural-hacking-how-russia-harvested-american-rage-to-reshape-us-politics-20171018-gz2xtm.html
They really are insidious. Social media is our soft underbelly.
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