Russian Twitter trolls stoked KKK fears at Mizzou during 2015 protests, report says
Source: Kansas City Star
Russian Twitter trolls stoked KKK fears at Mizzou during 2015 protests, report says
BY KATY BERGEN
kbergen@kcstar.com
February 14, 2018 07:27 AM
Updated 30 minutes ago
On Nov. 11, 2015, after “#PrayforMizzou” started to trend on Twitter in the wake of student protests over racial issues at the University of Missouri, a Twitter user with the handle @Fanfan1911 dispatched a warning. ... The Twitter user’s name was listed as Jermaine. And the message was sinister: “The cops are marching with the KKK! They beat up my little brother! Watch out!” ... Attached, was a photo of a black child with a bruised face.
The report was false, and the photo was of a child beaten by Ohio police a year before. But within minutes, the tweet had been shared and retweeted, by at least 70 bots who “chastised” the media for not covering racists on campus and real people, including scared students.
Russian Twitter trolls masterminded a tweet that fueled erroneous reports that the Ku Klux Klan was patrolling Mizzou’s campus during the 2015 student protests at the University of Missouri, a U.S. Air Force officer wrote in an article on “information-age warfare” published in Strategic Studies Quarterly late last year.
The hoax was part of a calculated and government-supported effort by Russia to disrupt democracies, and a warm-up to subsequent efforts to use social media to manipulate public opinion during the 2016 presidential election. ... The article, published by Lt. Col. Jarred Prier, direction of operations for the 20th Bomb Squadron, delves into how “social media is a tool for modern information-age warfare.” ... The article is taken from a thesis he completed as a master’s degree candidate at the Air University for the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article200011139.html
Retweeted by FruitOfThePoisonedHat: https://twitter.com/Popehat
Maybe this is banal news at this point. But a Russian troll account apparently trolled reporters and terrorized black students at Mizzou during the 2015 protests. It later smeared Syrian refugees (in German) and, then, became a Trump fan account.
Link to tweet
= new reply since forum marked as read
