Tuesday was a major news day, with both the Manafort and Cohen stories breaking within the same hour along with news of developments in the Mollie Tibbets case. Not surprisingly, Russian bots began to tout the latter in order to quash interest in the former, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a group which tracks Kremlin-oriented activities on Twitter, discovered. UK Independent:
Almost immediately after a guilty verdict was announced in the trial of Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud charges, there was a flurry of activity among hundreds of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts believed to be controlled by Russian government influence operations. Those accounts began posting thousands of tweets about Ms Tibbetts, the 20-year-old University of Iowa student who had been missing for nearly five weeks.
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ASD monitors three categories of Russian-linked Twitter accounts, according to Bret Schafer, a social media analyst for the organisation. The first category is comprised of accounts believed to be operated by Russian intelligence officials or influence operations. The second includes pro-Kremlin accounts which typically promote Russian government media. The final pool of Twitter handles are “extremely active” in amplifying the first two categories, along with other pro-Russian media themes.
None other than Fox News is a key factor in the Russian bot activity.
Throughout most of Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, #MollieTibbetts was the most shared hashtag among the Russian-linked Twitter accounts monitored by ASD. The accounts tweeted out a link to one Fox News story referring to Mr Rivera in its headline as an “illegal immigrant” hundreds of times, among other stories highlighting the 24-year-old suspect’s immigration status.
Of the top 10 urls shared by the network [of bots] on Tuesday worldwide, seven related to Ms Tibbetts’ death. The top trending hashtags also related to polarising issues regarding illegal immigration, including #buildthewall and #buildthedamwall.
Not only do the bots and Fox News go hand in glove, the GOP is totally on board for this. Newt Gingrich wrote Axios’ reporter Mike Allen the other day and shared this insight:
“We are living in two alternative political universes. In one, Manafort-Cohen is dispositive. In the other, illegal immigrants killing Mollie Tibbetts is dispositive.”
“If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose badly.”
Happily, Mollie Tibbets family does not go along with this agenda and so the GOP has lost this particular talking point. But that will not stop them. They know they’re in trouble and it’s only going to get worse in the run up to the election. Gingrich made that obvious and they’ll happily use Russian bots to fear monger with racist tropes, considering how well that worked for them in 2016.
Paul Ryan always trumpets “the party of Lincoln,” and another well loved GOP homily is “the party of Reagan.” Forget all that, this iteration of the GOP is the Party of Putin and Comrade Cheeto has plenty of allies in his party who would happily transform America into a Russian colony just as long as they stay on top.
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