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How Russian provocation works in 3 easy steps. /1
1st Have 1 of your trolls tweet something outrageously provocative, here an offensive statement about a woman murdered in Charlottesville /2
2nd Since your troll's statement is so disgusting, expect someone in good faith will RT to get the tweet deleted or the account banned. /3
3rd Expect that people will then get angry & blame the other side, here maybe even blaming the Republican Party for the crass claim. /4
This easy 1-2-3 provocation is a win for Putin who aims to promote & exploit political & social divisions in our society to weaken us. /5
Let's take a quick look at the initial provocation. /6
GoodBoiGets claims to be a Greek supremacist who supports Golden Dawn. /7
I've gone through his tweets & see no evidence that that is the case. /8
He tweets about the US from a far right-wing white supremacist position, not about anything concerning Greece. /9
While I didn't do a detailed analysis on GoodBoi like I did on Marcus, I bet GoodBoi is another Russian troll. storify.com/BarryGsGhost/r… /10
Look at when GoodBoi tweets. It's like a Russian working at a troll factory, not when most Americans would be tweeting. /11 
Look at when GoodBoi joined Twitter. It's May 2017, just a few months ago. Russian bots & trolls often use new accounts. /12
Look at how he lies about things. GoodBoi says this is a photo of his grandfather with his sweetheart. archive.fo/CBasr /13
Ask yourself, why would the grandfather of a Greek supremacist be a German Nazi officer? Does that make any sense? /14
Ask yourself, why is GoodBoi claiming this photo is of his grandfather when it's a stolen image? npr.org/2011/05/07/136… /15
Consider that GoodBoi's uses this photo to simultaneously attract white nationalists & disgust right-thinking Americans. /16
I could go on but you get the point. GoodBoi is just another Russian troll designed to further Putin's goals to weaken the US. /17
So now let's talk about the second step, here Rick's tweet. /18
I thank & credit Rick for opening my eyes to Trump. He's had to deal with tons of harassment for his good work. /19
I offer some thoughts merely as a suggestion & in no way as any criticism whatsoever. /20
We all see these provocations regularly. What should we do? I have two suggestions. /21
1st if you decide to RT it, consider expressly stating that this is likely just another putinbot designed to provoke us. /22
Doing so focuses our attention on our true adversary & serves as a vaccine to guard against emotional reactions blaming the other side. /23
2nd realize that we're not going to win this battle against Russia deza/provokatsiya piecemeal. We should be looking at the big picture. /24
For example, look at @MarcusC22973194. I outed him as a left-wing anti-Trump troll. storify.com/BarryGsGhost/r… /25
.@conspirator0 just did a great analysis of Russian trolls that also had 8 digits in their names. /26
.@conspirator0's analysis just made it to the front page of The Times in London thetimes.co.uk/article/thousa… /27
and to The Independent too, outing a hugely influential pro-Farage pro-Brexit user as a Russian troll. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n… /28
In other words, @conspirator0 knows his stuff & we can trust him. So here's the reason why I mention @conspirator0's analysis... /29
.@conspirator0 found the network of Russian bots/trolls with 8 digits in their names yielded 63,099 accounts. /30
Even if we knocked off 50 accounts a day every day, it'd take us 3.5 years to work our way through that many accounts. /31
Plus the network that @conspirator0 discovered of users with 8 digits in their names is a small fraction of Russia's troll network. /32
Based upon my reading & what I see online, I estimate Russia is running at least 100,000s of bots & trolls. /33
Plus Russia is always adding accounts, so it can replace its trolls faster than we can knock them off one by one. /34
So what can we do? Very very few of us, certainly not me, have the skills of @conspirator0. /35
None of us wants to invest hours of our time into exposing some user as a Russian troll. /36
Sure, we could continue to report offensive tweets to @Twitter & maybe a tweet might get deleted & maybe even an account terminated but /37
folks, we're at war, it's a war of information operations, it's taking place here on Twitter & Facebook & Russia is our enemy. /38
Even if it feels good, reporting tweets & trolls one by one is not going to win this war & ultimately is ineffectual virtue signaling. /39
So my 2nd suggestion is instead of reporting individual tweets or trolls, PRESSURE TWITTER TO DELETE RUSSIA'S STATE-SPONSORED BOTNETS. /40
Twitter has been utterly failing to date. To win this war, we need to pressure Twitter to clean house. storify.com/BarryGsGhost/t… /41
Now just a short thought about step #3 in Russia's easy 1-2-3 provocations. We all see lots of provocations everyday. /42
Russia's provocations are a two-way street. While GoodBoi is far right-wing, Russia is running fake left-wing #antifa trolls too. /43
When we see something provocative, instead of blaming the other side, consider whether it might be yet another Russia troll. /44
And when someone responds to the provocation, as happened here, saying this is the Republican's fault /45
consider whether that might be another troll too, one designed to anger us & further our divisions. 1-2-3 provocation all over again. /46
To sum up, at this moment, Rick's tweet earned 71 RTs & 191 likes. More than 100 of us replied. /47
What did that get us? 1 tweet deleted, then 1 burner account deleted. So what? I guarantee you that troll didn't lose his job in Moscow. /48
But imagine if all of us turned our collective effort into getting Twitter to clean house. We'd be doing exactly the same as we're doing /49
now but towards the larger goal of pressuring Twitter to delete Russia's networks of state-sponsored trolls. That's how we win this war. END
A few quick postscripts. #1 GoodBoi is still tweeting & says he deleted his tweet cause his notifications were blowing up. No win for us. /1
#2 Another tweeter screenshot GoodBoi's offensive tweet. So ppl know what we're talking about, here it is. /2
#3 Like other trolls, GoodBoi steals valor, claiming to be a "combat arms service member in the armed forces." archive.is/zoXos /3
Unsurprisingly he can't answer basic questions about & uses the wrong language to describe his supposed military service. 4/4
