One Popular Post by the Russians Said ‘If Killary Wins There Will Be Riots Nationwide, Not Seen Since the Times of Revolutionary War!!’
The Russian government’s online troll army, officially the Internet Research Agency, set up several fake Facebook pages, or groups, that called for violence against Black Lives Matter, undocumented immigrants, and the police. More than two dozen posts among just three groups encouraged violence, with some of the posts likely having been “boosted” to extend their reach. Boosting a post requires paying Facebook to extend the reach to users that would not ordinarily see the post. Those users can be micro-targeted based on a wide variety of behavioral, belief, and demographic information. The intent was similar to the group’s work during the 2016 election: sow division and mistrust of American systems by American voters within the U.S. itself.Â
“The posts are part of a database compiled by Jonathan Albright, the research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who tracks and analyzes Russian propaganda,” CNN, which first reported the story Tuesday afternoon, reports. The news network notes these pages continued to operate well after the election until they were shut down.
“The group ‘Secured Borders’ had the most violent rhetoric, some of it well after the presidential election. A post in March 2017 described the threat of ‘dangerous illegal aliens’ and said, ‘The only way to deal with them is to kill them all.’ Another post about immigrants called for a draconian new law, saying, ‘if you get deported that’s your only warning. You come back you get shot and rolled into a ditch… BANG, problem solved.’ And a post about refugees said, ‘the state department needs to be burned to the ground and the rubble reduced to ashes.'”
One post by Secured Borders shared in October 2016, which was interacted with more than 100,000 times, stated, “if Killary wins there will be riots nationwide, not seen since the times of Revolutionary war!!”
The Columbia University database shows the Secured Borders groups’s posts were shared 5.6 million times, with nearly 1.6 million interactions.Â
A group called “Being Patriotic,” which had 200,000 followers, had “regularly posted content praising Donald Trump’s candidacy, stated in an April 2016 post that Black Lives Matter activists who disrespected the American flag should be ‘be immediately shot.'”
Another Russia-linked group, “Blacktivist,” described police brutality in a November 2016 post weeks after the election, and stated, “Black people have to do something. An eye for an eye. The law enforcement officers keep harassing and killing us without consequences.”
The Trump administration has ignored a law President Trump himself signed that required specific sanctions against Russia in retribution for Putin’s interference with the U.S. election to be implemented by October 1. They have yet to be implemented.Â
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