Porn bots in telegram3/16/2024 ![]() It was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who also ran the Wagner mercenary group until he died in a mysterious helicopter crash last year. Petersburg that gained notoriety for its role in attempting to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was a Kremlin-linked troll farm launched in St. Already, it echoes the incident when Russian operatives were accused of organizing an anti-immigrant rally and a counterprotest event to their own rally in Texas ahead of the 2016 election.Ĭaroline Orr, a behavioral scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who tracks disinformation online, wrote in her newsletter Weaponized that the term “Free Texas” in Russian was being “used extensively, and nearly exclusively, by Russian accounts associated with the notorious Internet Research Agency, which housed the 2016 election interference operation.” Some experts have been linking this campaign to previous Russian disinformation campaigns. In recent days, the bots have also been responding to posts unrelated to Texas by referencing the situation at the border. ![]() One article, for example, appeared on a fake site called Warfare Insider, and stated that Texas “has become a battleground symbolizing the clash between state and federal authorities.” While previous Doppelganger campaigns shared links to fake websites designed to look like legitimate ones but with fake articles, this campaign linked to websites run, built, and maintained by the Doppelganger operatives to push narratives to suit their needs. Researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation research group that has been closely tracking a Russian disinformation network known as Doppelganger on X, shared data exclusively with WIRED that shows a network of bot accounts previously linked to the Doppelganger campaign has been deployed online in the past week to discuss the Texas issue. What’s bad for America is great for Russia.” “They want a civil war/chaos more than anything. “They are in every single group on any social media,” one member who calls themselves ‘Eat Putin’s Heart’ wrote on Telegram in response to a question about why Russians were members of the group. The convoy’s official channels on Telegram were also infiltrated by Russian accounts, though some were removed or called out by the US-based members of the group. “Fears of FBI Spying on ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Show US Democracy Dying,” one Sputnik headline read last week. Last week, the Russian Telegram channels and state media also began to boost the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy led by far-right extremists, sovereign citizens, QAnon adherents, and anti-vaccine conspiracists who traveled from Virginia to the border in Texas in support of Abbott. Russian state media echoed these claims, and published a flood of articles with headlines featuring phrases like “Civil War 2.0.” They also spread conspiracies claiming that “US elites will keep the border wide open.” “Russian Telegram channels just blew up overnight, and started really dialing into messaging specifically about the possibility that Texas could be an independent state, the possibility that there could be a US civil war.” “When I'm trying to identify disinformation operations in the wild I need to understand the initial signals and ideas that Russian state media and influencers are sharing,” Walter tells WIRED. ![]() Days later, when Texas governor Greg Abbott refused to stand down, former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, who is currently deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, claimed that the Texas border dispute is “another vivid example of the US hegemony getting weaker.” The disinformation campaign began in earnest in late January, and expanded after Russian politicians spoke out when the US Supreme Court lifted an order by a lower court and sided with President Joe Biden’s administration to rule that US Border Patrol officers were allowed to take down razor-wire fencing erected by the Texas National Guard. WIRED has also obtained exclusive access to data from two separate disinformation research groups that demonstrate a coordinated Russian effort on Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) to sow discord by pushing the narrative that the US is heading for civil war. A Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |