Thread by @HeatherMoAndCo

There’s a coordinated international hit job on 🇨🇦’s gov’t. 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇷🇺🇨🇳 operations. The ops coming out of England may be a proxy for Russian ops amplified by England’s ever-present far right. They inauthentically trend anti-Trudeau hashtags using accelerator botnets & trolls #cdnpoli

But, as I’ve said many times, these ops are only successful when they can get real people to engage & perpetuate them. So 3k people in 🇨🇦 + 4K in 🇺🇸 + 3K in 🇬🇧 + troll factories & botnets, suddenly appears like an overwhelming movement that spurs others to believe. #CdnDisinfo

Troll networks are complex echo chambers that have steadily evolved since the early days of 🇷🇺’s Internet Research Agency. To be successful they MUST include authentic users. So a typical response from people in these malign networks is “she says I’m a bot!! 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣”. Um, no

The high engagement accounts in these malicious networks are weaponized in real time. Real people who tweet desired disinformation & amplified by troll operations, botnets AND real people. Having a fake account as a “star” in a network, is very 2016. #Cdndisinfo #cdnpoli

Then there are accounts that get weaponized via hashtags in order to get them to trend. Take this odd account. Virtually no engagement for any tweet, until an anti-Trudeau hashtag is used. This is inauthentic weaponized amplification. It doesn’t matter if the account is “real”.

The ultimate goal is to make people feel like they are right and that they “belong”. Essentially, it is the hacking of human psychology for nefarious ends. #CdnDisinfo #cdnpoli #UKPolitics #USPolitics #Facebook #Twitter #instagram

I’d also like to add re the hacking of human psychology, these anti Trudeau hashtags, endless adversarial created memes & disinformation, are also designed to create subconscious cues. So that people will have an automatic negative response that bypasses critical thought #cdnpoli

Right on cue a troll shows up to either deliberately or stupidly misrepresent literally everything I said in this thread. 🙄