Russian trolls posed as black activists on Tumblr and generated hundreds of thousands of interactions for content that ranged from calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” to supporting Bernie Sanders and decrying racial injustice and police violence in the US, according to new findings from researcher Jonathan Albright and BuzzFeed News.
While Facebook and Twitter continue to face intense public and congressional pressure over the activity from trolls working for the Russian Internet Research Agency, Tumblr has somehow managed to escape scrutiny. But the blogging platform was in fact home to a powerful, largely unrevealed network of Russian trolls focused on black issues and activism.
“The evidence we’ve collected shows a highly engaged and far-reaching Tumblr propaganda-op targeting mostly teenage and twenty-something African Americans. This appears to have been part of an ongoing campaign since early 2015,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
a “propaganda-op targeting mostly teenage and twenty-something African Americans”
“ongoing campaign since early 2015”
im gonna spell it out loud and clear for everyone: theyre attempting to say black lives matter is a russian psyop.
don’t let this happen.
N.B. this is in a long tradition of trying to discredit antiracist activism as purely the result of foreign meddling.
And you know what? Even when this has a kernel of truth, who gives a fuck. The Soviet Union supported some racial justice movements in the US on principled internationalist lines, and good for them. The stuff the current Russian government is reported as supporting is far less coherent, but even granting all the claims that have been made by my own country’s intelligence services, 1) it doesn’t extend further than basically a minuscule number of shitposts (nearly anybody who’s had a few posts go viral has generated “hundreds of thousands” of “interactions,” and have you seen the example posts floating around for their FB subversion? lmao) which are legitimate participation in the Discourse if anything is, and 2) some shithead white nationalist was just as bad before he got reblogged by putinlovr420 as after, and BLM would be just as good.
Our collective obsession over this, which more or less IS openly the result an intelligence-agency-led propaganda campaign, is basically creating an environment in which you can engage in ad hom dismissal without even producing evidence about the hominem in question.
Russian Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr And The Company Refuses To Say Anything About It
QueerAnarchism 