October 31, 2017

Here’s What Pro-Russia Trolls Are Promoting Today

My colleague Denise Clifton writes today about the ongoing Russian social media campaign in the US, and does a great job of summarizing what we know. She also links to a fascinating website I hadn’t heard of before: Hamilton 68, which purports to follow Russian influence on Twitter. [Editor’s note: Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance to Secure Democracy, discontinued the dashboard in 2018. The group has since been criticized for refusing to disclose specifics, including which accounts it was tracking and which if any were directly Kremlin-linked. This article has been updated.] Here’s one of their charts this morning:

These accounts really like Tucker Carlson! They’re also really into Tony Podesta, on the usual right-wing assumption that flinging mud at Tony will tarnish everyone else named Podesta too.

Will it work? The Republican/Russian disinformation campaign is so obviously kindergarten level that I have high hopes the media will basically ignore it. There’s nothing to be done about the quarter of American that gets their news exclusively from Donald Trump and Fox News, but the rest of the country will mostly follow the media’s lead about what’s important and what’s not. Here’s hoping they act responsibly this time around.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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