Russian trolls pushed graphic, racist tweets to American voters
Source: NBC News
Warning: this story contains offensive content.
A zealous band of Russian trolls flooded Twitter with hundreds of thousands of divisive posts in 2016 accusing Democrats of satanic practices and supporting rape in an attempt to influence the presidential election, according to a new analysis of a Twitter database by NBC News.
The effort tricked thousands of users into spreading graphic racial epithets across social media, interweaving provocative content with disinformation and falsehoods.
The tweets were uncovered in a database of over 202,000 deleted Russian troll tweets that NBC News compiled from several sources, including three sources familiar with Twitter's application programming interface, or API, an online system that allows outside software developers to work with the data underlying users' tweets.
All of the sources asked for anonymity to avoid being identified as possibly violating Twitter's developer policy; two of the sources asked not to be identified because they didn't want to become targets of Russian trolls themselves.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-trolls-pushed-graphic-racist-tweets-american-voters-n823001
SunSeeker
(53,580 posts)msongs
(70,114 posts)Wwcd
(6,288 posts)And still repeated & believed today
IronLionZion
(46,919 posts)as it exposed many long simmering biases and divisions. It really amplified a lot of prejudice
In the end, the troll strategy was an export of methods Russia has used for years domestically to get citizens to see themselves not as part of a nation but as members of smaller ethnic and identity-based groups, and play all sides against each other.
"They want us fighting among ourselves," said McFaul, the former ambassador. "Then we're distracted. We're not talking about Syria. We're not talking about American leadership. We're questioning whether democracy will survive. We're less of a player internationally and that's good for Russia."
FailureToCommunicate
(14,313 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,461 posts)I'm old enough to remember reading that government-backed trolling was cause for global outrage and was an assault on the very cornerstones of wellbeing for every denizen of the free world...
Life comes at you fast...
LudwigPastorius
(10,729 posts)...and Hannity and Drudge dutifully regurgitated that crap.
Is it time to register the entire GOP as Agents of a Foreign Government?