Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out posts like “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci” and voting disinformation at the direction of an affiliate of Turning Point USA - copying the spam-like like behavior of bots and trolls washingtonpost.com/politics/turni…
“In 2016, there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a troll farm and writing salacious articles for money. In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.” washingtonpost.com/politics/turni…
This is increasingly the story of 2020: “the scale and scope of domestic disinformation is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could do to us.” washingtonpost.com/politics/turni…
As @LissandraVilla and I wrote in the latest TIME, the greatest threat in 2020 is homegrown as Americans take a page from the Kremlin’s 2016 playbook to weaponize misinformation on social media (especially about voting) to advance their political goals time.com/5887438/trump-…
“2016 was the ‘fake news’ election, but 2020 makes it look like nothing in comparison. This infrastructure...has now become concretized under Donald Trump down to the state level, the city level. It’s the democratization of propaganda.” time.com/5887438/trump-…
Important to note that just like in 2016, a lot of this misinformation targets Black and Latino communities.
This is “the next major barrier to the right to vote...we see it in the same trajectory as a poll tax or a literacy tax,” @andre_banks told me time.com/5887438/trump-…
Laura Loomer’s campaign/“Twitter army” used messaging “squarely targeting Black and Latino voters,” according to an analysis shared with TIME, partly by seeding false claims using the hashtags #JohnLewis, #JimCrowJoe and #BlackLivesMatter time.com/5887438/trump-…
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