Daily Beast: Americans Are Easy Marks for Russian Trolls, According to New Data

[Botany]

You don’t need to read the federal indictments to spot the moment Russia began targeting the United States with its army of internet trolls.

Just chart the American flag emoji. Best estimates trace the founding of the Internet Research Agency to August 2013, and for eight months of its existence the Saint Petersburg troll farm was focused on influencing citizens in Russia and Russia’s near abroad. Then in April 2014 the Kremlin-linked organization launched “Project Lakhta,” according to federal prosecutors, aimed squarely at the United States.

The IRA’s first American flag emoji appeared on Twitter the next month, first a trickle, and then a torrent. Over the next four years the Saint Petersburg troll farm unfurled 70,372 American flags, reaching peak flagness on August 12, 2017 when one IRA sock puppet crammed 43 flags into a single tweet with the hashtag “MAGA.”

snip

In the end the biggest contributor to the troll’s American success story was the divisiveness already present here, said Fox. “This content is still circulating because it resonates so well with people who are angry on both sides... It exploited an environment that we were and are living in.” Even the IRA’s decision to slather its content with American flags might have been a deliberate ploy. A series of experiments in 2008 demonstrated that being in the presence of the flag doesn’t inspire patriotic love of country, as one would expect, but instead reliably summons feelings of nationalism, defined by the scientists as “an ideology of superiority of the ingroup over outgroups and implies the exclusion or even domination of others.” In its secret campaign to sow division in the U.S., Russia may well have tried to weaponize Old Glory.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/americans-are-easy-marks-for-russian-trolls-new-data-prove


What Russia did and is still doing was and still is an act of war and Trump & company, Fox News,
McConnell, Ryan*, Trey Gowdy, the RNC, and others who worked hand and glove w/Russia in order
to gain political advantage and power are guilty of treason.


* The New Yorker; Paul Ryan Keeps It All in the Family
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/paul-ryan-keeps-it-family-kevin-mccarthy-russia-trump

[kairos12]

1. Swaggert fooled them. Russians fool them. They are rubes.

[JayhawkSD]

2. And we keep missing this part of the story.

"In the end the biggest contributor to the troll’s American success story was the divisiveness already present here..."

They are turning our own problem back onto ourselves, which they would not be able to do if we did not create our own problem to begin with. Divisiveness, by definition, arises and is nurtured on both sides. It cannot be blamed on one side. It takes two to tango. Two sides create it and two sides nurture it. If an outside agency feeds it, that outside agency cannot be blamed for the existence of the problem.

Pogo got it right. "We have met the enemy, and it is us."

[Turbineguy]

3. I see a lot of people who

cross the street without looking both ways or even either way. We think we live in a secure society.