https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/russian-trolls-walkaway-movement/
Russian trolls on Twitter pose as ex-Democrats for #WalkAway movement
David Gilmour— July 9 at 10:57AM
Kremlin-affiliated trolls have subversively co-opted
#WalkAway as an influence campaign,
data appears to show. The hashtag is boosting visibility for a right-wing-hyped non-movement of disenchanted liberals who are supposedly abandoning the Democratic Party in a bid to breed division.
Data available through
Hamilton 68, an analysis project focused on monitoring agitprop and backed by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, shows that swarms of Russian troll accounts made #WalkAway one of the highest ranking hashtags on Twitter in the past 48 hours.
One writer for Arc Digital
noticed similar trends and came to the same conclusion.
“The primary functional goal of an astroturfed campaign like this one is to manipulate public opinion by gaming online algorithms to amplify certain content and push it onto people’s social media feeds and to the top of search engine results,” wrote behavioral scientist Caroline Orr. [snip]
The U.S. intelligence community has, of course, made clear its assessment that Russia had sought to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process” during the 2016 presidential election. In February, special counsel
Robert Mueller in a series of indictments
laid out at least part of the framework by which the Kremlin had sought to do that.
Mueller brought charges against Russian nationals and troll farm the Internet Research Agency, which employed hundreds of individuals in a complex operation that involved the creation of thousands of fake personas to “conduct information warfare against the United States.”
These are the same kind of bot networks that Hamilton 68 has repeatedly found to be commandeering or simply amplifying highly partisan social media campaigns, like
#ReleaseTheMemo or #WalkAway, in a bid to disrupt and suppress Democratic momentum.