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  1. #1
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    Russians Are Using African Troll Factories—and Encrypted Messaging—to Attack the U.S.

    ABUJA, Nigeria—When Coby, a 29-year-old Nigerian studying in Russia, was first added to the WhatsApp group “One Africa, One Success” in late February, he thought he was on a platform for like-minded students looking to discuss issues about their continent and "offer solutions to Africa's unique problems,” as the group description put it.

    But Coby soon discovered that posts by many of the platform's participants had very little to do with the real problems facing Africa. Instead they were filled with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus, many of them claiming the Democratic Party and various philanthropists in the United States—especially Bill and Melinda Gates—were behind its spread.


    “In virtually every post,” says Coby, who asked that his last name not be published, “either someone in the U.S. is blamed for the coronavirus or an American is accused of trying to exploit the situation."


    Messages on the platform seen by The Daily Beast push the notion that COVID-19 was created by Democratic Party politicians in the U.S. specifically to discredit President Donald Trump, and medical solutions proposed for the pandemic, including vaccines, aim to decimate Africa’s population.

    Such incendiary claims appear to be part of a broader phenomenon: a Russian government effort to use “troll factories” in Nigeria and Ghana to push divisive messages onto Facebook and Twitter that inflame racial tensions globally—and especially in the U.S. as it approaches elections in November.


    Some of this was revealed by a detailed CNN report earlier this year that drew heavily on research by two professors, Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, at Clemson University in the United States.


    In many cases, as Linvill and Warren showed, the trolls claimed to be Americans posting from within the U.S. when, in fact, they were holed up in an Accra bungalow. In other instances they used their African connection on accounts with tags like @africamustwake to try to gain credibility. Largely as a result of the CNN reporting, Twitter and Facebook took down scores of accounts and pages.


    But campaigns on WhatsApp and other messaging services open new doors for toxic disinformation.

    MORE https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia...he-us?ref=wrap

  2. #2
    fcuked off SKkin's Avatar
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    OMG the Russians are coming!


    The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

    A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

    Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media | Technology | The Guardian

  3. #3
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    ^At the top of the page. This article is more than 9 years old. It isn’t news and it isn’t on topic.

    Do you actually have something to say about the current news than a nine year old article, “We do it, too!”

    Because “we do it, too” means this isn’t true? Or Russia has the right to fight back?

    Or you want to wait a few years and do a thread about it?

    CURRENT news.
    Last edited by misskit; 08-05-2020 at 05:10 AM.

  4. #4
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    panama hat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    Or you want to wait a few years and do a thread about it?
    But . . . this must be important as well, even without the bold/yellow garbage all through an unrelated article

    During the war, the Bloody Sunday at St Petersburg had shocked the Russian population when 46the soldiers opened the fire against their own population. The subsequent losses of the warincreased the political pressure on the tsar and his government, because the ordinary people werenot willing to support an imperialist war at the edge of the world just for the fame and dreams ofthe royal ruler. Consequently, the steady growth of the revolutionary movement was highly 47related to the war itself. If the soldiers were sent to Manchuria there was no sufficient securityagainst a possible revolution and the increasing number of rebellions due to recruitment attemptsof the government underlined this development – one counted 107 violent incidents connected tothe recruitment of new troops between September and December 1904. Finally, it was internal 48reasons that led the tsar to seek peace and in October 1905, the October Manifesto was granted to Sakurai, Human Bullets, xv. 45 For a description what happened on Bloody Sunday see George Gapon, The Story of My Life (New York: E.P. 46Dutton & Co., 1906), 174-185. John Bushnell, “The Specter of Mutinous Reserves: How the War Produced the October Manifesto,“ in The 47Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World War Zero Vol. 1, ed. John W. Steinberg et al., History of WarfareVol. 29 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005), 334. Ibid. 335.

  5. #5
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    ^At the top of the page. This article is more than 9 years old. It isn’t news and it isn’t on topic.

    Do you actually have something to say about the current news than a nine year old article, “We do it, too!”

    Because “we do it, too” means this isn’t true? Or Russia has the right to fight back?

    Or you want to wait a few years and do a thread about it?

    CURRENT news.
    The US *could* do it too, but being a dictator, Putin has a massive security apparatus filtering the global internet down to a trickle, and making sure that the Russian people can not see the truth about his activities.

    I mean he's got his own version of trumpanzees, and if they could read stories about 5G masts poisoning vodka, the US would be making sure the proletariat got them.

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