It was obvious it wasn’t the Tennessee GOP because the content wasn’t extreme enough to actually be them.
No way they weren’t complicit.
Wow - one of the tweets includes “This needs retweets” & it gets retweeted 1.5k times. Probably with the same plea for more retweets.
Makes me think of the old fabrege shampoo adds. I tell two friends, and they tell to friends, and so on, and so on…
But Russia didn’t interfere in our elections… (cough.)
“@TEN_GOP had at least 143,552 followers when it was shut down…”
Trump Trolls following Russian trolls.
How long was it running before the real tennessee gop decided they needed plausible deniability?
Soon it will come out that virtually every social network site had at least as many trolls as real people. The infiltration was immense to say the least but, unfortunately, none of these social network sites (Facebook, reddit, twitter, etc…) want to admit to this reality because it would mean cutting their apparent traffic stream (and, thus, overall business) in half.
The Russians are really, REALLY good at recruiting “Useful Idiots” to do their bidding.
Putin was a master of this when he was a KGB agent in East Germany, and used his skills and connections to become the despotic Dictator of Russia.
Using stupid, angry, ignorant Americans to do their bidding is one of the FSB (KGB) oldest tactics. They have been doing it since the Eisenhower Administration.
Now, with platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it is just too easy for them.
Based on the available evidence, there is a case to be made that Russian intelligence operatives have infiltrated the Republican party and its leadership at the federal and state levels. I would not be surprised if they have cells that are active in the county and city/town Republican parties.
You know, this is simultaneously the funniest and the scariest thing I have read all day.
I think I would feel better about it if we could tell how many of those 143,552 followers where also fake.
While I think there could be a case for that, I feel like it’s much more likely that the Russians don’t even need to infiltrate the depths of the party structure - why attribute to malice that which can be ascribed to egoism and greed?
After all, the Republican base are tribalism sheep who pretend to be wolves while the “donor” and political/operative class has long been suborned by unfettered greed and inured to basic compassion and decency. It’s not like much is needed to push this group towards McCarthyism 2.0 or so.
The propaganda networks put fears front and center with tribalistic window dressing which the politicians use to keep their votes hostage while passing the pernicious legislation that allows the rich to get richer. Of course, the wealthy feel they are a nation unto themselves and don’t give a shit about the poor. Things get better for the wealthy and worse for the sheep - which the propaganda networks uses to feed the narrative that the Democrats are (for various, contradictory, but who cares to analyzes reasons) anti-prosperity and endangering us all. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Russian just needs to superficially preen the vanity of certain subgroups and make the inimical factions seem larger than they really are to have an exponentially outsized impact on the politics of the country.
(The other half of this equation is disillusioning those disemfranchised who don’t believe in Republican Snake oil. Instead, they play upon the divisions within the big tent opposition party, which, considering how fringe the tenets of the Republican Party is, has essentially accreted enough viewpoints to really be two parties, probably. You know, were this a functional republic, at least… but that’s another rabbit hole of thought for another day. Point is divide and conquer in the big tent by exacerbating micro-tensions and basically performing an operational microcosm of the nation-level operation. Massage egos, artificially enhance the numbers of the more extremist and combative elements which serve to increase the confidence of said elements while introducing more doubt/indecision/vacillating from the middle-ground types, which creates a cycle.)
Really, Russia has just hijacked the southern and anti-expert/education strategies of the USA’s right wing and obliquely dialed it up to 11. To the point where some experts (nation watchers our government employed to monitor other countries for potential civil dissolution) think the US could be headed towards another civil war.
Color me skeptical, since the typical GOP response to learning that a hostile foreign power interfered in US elections seems to be: “So? As long as they’re helping Republicans, who cares?”
It was obviously fake because it was occasionally funny, which the real GOP never is.
Given that the account had been around and popular for long before then, that seems like an obvious response.