Report: Russian Twitter Trolls Influenced Mizzou’s 2015 Protests

El Taco8 years ago

You can suck a big fat one, you hear me, Mr. Putin? You and your Cheeto-fingered, Mountain Dew-drinking social media armies can go and eat a big bag of dicks. The biggest bag of dicks in all the land; they’re all for you.

As if you needed more proof that Mizzou’s 2015 protests were a bunch of hot garbage, a new report links Russian social media trolls to a fanning of the flames regarding racially-charged outrage on campus.

From The Columbia Tribune:

The fear was enlarged and spread by a now-suspended Twitter account that warned “The cops are marching with the KKK! They beat up my little brother! Watch out!” that included a photo of a black child with a severely bruised face and the hashtag #PrayForMizzou.

The tweet and photo were fake, Lt. Col. Jarred Prier, director of operations for the 20th Bomb Squadron, wrote in “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare” for the winter edition of Strategic Studies Quarterly.

…

The Twitter account, with the handle @FanFan1911 and user name Jermaine while tweeting about Mizzou, was used to spread panic about a fake chemical factory fire in St. Mary Parish, La., in 2014 and fear of Syrian refugees in Germany in 2016, Prier wrote. The account’s original MU tweets were retweeted by an army of 70 robot accounts and hundreds of legitimate users and became part of the huge volume of tweets about the university at that time, he wrote.

Wait, you mean social media is a complete and total cesspool of misinformation when anything politics-related occurs that might get people emotionally riled up and inclined to pass on information without fact-checking? Well, color me surprised.

The full report is incredibly interesting, especially since it comes from a military man. This was a non-violent university protest. Imagine what America’s counterintelligence unit is dealing with on the national level on a daily basis.

The report goes on to state this wasn’t necessarily an isolated incident, either. As with most fake news-spreading Russian troll accounts, they travel in packs.

From The Columbia Tribune:

But @FanFan1911 wasn’t the only account he studied for the article, Prier wrote.

“I mention only one particular user in this article, but I also monitored a dozen or so accounts that contributed to that hoax,” he wrote. “Each account followed a pattern that also happened to align with noted Russian influence operations in Europe and eventually in the U.S. presidential election.”

The effort targeting MU may have been a warm-up for 2016.

We’re truly not a smart species. In 2015 and 2016, it was trusting fake Twitter accounts to reinforce your political beliefs. In 2017 and 2018, it was eating Tide Pods. I assume by 2019-2020, we’ll just be drooling on the floor, punching ourselves in the face repeatedly while snorting lead paint chips.

Hopefully we can learn from this and maybe not jump to conclusions tweeted out by Twitter eggs. I doubt it, but I believe in us. Sorta..

[via The Columbia Tribune]

Image via YouTube/Kayla Beck