If Russia can create fake ‘Black Lives Matter’ accounts, who will next?

By Anne Applebaum Columnist October 15, 2017 Email the author

Send a spy to spread rumors on the other side of the front line. Drop leaflets into enemy territory. Debilitate the enemy using its own people, in their own language — Lord Haw-Haw, Tokyo Rose — over their own radios. The tactics of demoralization are as old as politics — as old as war — and now we know what the second-decade-of-the-21st-century version looks like, too. 

Pushed by a congressional investigation, Facebook has finally turned over some 3,000 advertisements and links to pages created and paid for by Russian trolls. Among them was “Secured Borders,” a fake, Kremlin-backed “organization” that appeared to be based in Idaho. It pumped out messages about immigrant “scum” and attracted 133,000 followers before it was shut down. In August 2016, its Russian backers actually promoted a rally in Twin Falls to protest an alleged “upsurge of violence against American citizens.”

At the same time, a different set of Russian operatives sponsored and advertised two black rappers who bashed “racist b----” Hillary Clinton. They also borrowed the identity of a Muslim group that claimed Clinton “created, funded and armed” al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Meanwhile, thousands of computerized bots pushed repetitive pro-Trump messages on Twitter, persuading many actual humans to respond.

All these games are familiar: Russians have used similar tactics for years in Europe, where pro-Russian social-media users on Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms have long sought to amplify support for parties of the far left and the far right. During Germany’s recent elections, official Russian media and networks of Russian bots tweeted and posted messages warning of immigration’s dire threat to Germany and pushing the cause of Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant party.