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Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
@RVAwonk
Jan 18, 2018 • 10 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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The FBI is investigating whether Alexander Torshin, a top Russian banker (known as the "Russian godfather"), illegally funneled money to the NRA to help Trump win.

(The NRA spent $30 million to support Trump — 3X what they gave to Romney's 2012 campaign)

mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-wo…
<quick thread>
A bit of background info on Alexander Torshin, the Russian bank exec and suspected mobster/organized crime boss who is now being investigated for potentially funneling $ through the NRA to help Trump's campaign. (That's him at the 2016 NRA convention👇).

/1/ Image
According to intel assessments, Torshin is part of a years-long "aggressive Kremlin effort to forge alliances" w/top GOP figures, including those close to the WH. The NRA is a major conduit of influence here... and possibly also a cash conduit.

/2/
Trump was set to meet with Alexander Torshin in February before the National Prayer Breakfast. The meeting was canceled the night before when an NSC staffer blew the whistle and flagged Torshin as a potential Russian mobster...

/3/
In Nov., @NBCNews reported that Jared Kushner failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture & dinner invite" from Alexander Torshin.

Torshin wanted Trump to attend an event at the NRA's May 2016 convention in Louisville, KY.

/4/
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/k…
The undisclosed email chain suggested that Torshin "was seeking to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official during the NRA convention, and that he may have had a message for Trump from Putin."

/5/
Also in Nov., Don Jr admitted that he met with Torshin at a private dinner at the NRA's 2016 convention — just as Torshin requested in the (undisclosed) emails to Kushner (in which he said he wanted to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official).

/6/
Torshin and Trump have reportedly known each other since at least 2012. According to Bloomberg, the two "had a jovial exchange at the NRA convention in Tennessee in 2015."

...interesting how this keeps circling back to the NRA, isn't it?

/7/
Another key figure in the Torshin-NRA-Trump nexus: Torshin's "special assistant" Maria Butina, who attended one of Trump's first campaign events in April 2015 — during which Trump signaled his willingness to lift sanctions on Russia.

/8/
Here's Trump in 2015, suggesting to Maria Butina (Russian crime boss Alexander Torshin's special assistant) that he would lift sanctions on Russia.

"I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin... I don't think you'd need the sanctions."

/9/

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More from @RVAwonk

Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Jan 24
Given current events, it bears repeating that when the Trump admin spreads disinformation, they’re not doing it because they expect you to accept their lies as truth. They do it to erode the notion of truth and destroy our ability to distinguish between truth & falsehood.
The act of lying is bad enough. But selling the idea that truth doesn't matter — or doesn't even exist — is far more corrosive. Democracy rests upon a shared understanding of basic facts. We can't debate issues or hold leaders accountable w/o these agreed upon facts.
If the Trump administration can cast doubt on the very existence of an objective truth, they can also undermine the external mechanisms that we rely on to hold government officials accountable & prevent abuses of power.
Read 7 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Jan 1
I wrote about Nick Shirley’s bullsh*t video and the disinformation tactics he used to make it go viral. 🧵

Link in comments below. Image
Please give it a read and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber so you can get more content like this!
weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/nick-shirley…
You’ve probably seen Nick Shirley’s video accusing Somali-run daycares in Minnesota of fraud. Hopefully you’ve also seen some of the follow-ups showing that security footage & operating hours disprove his central claim of “no children.”

It went viral anyway. Let’s discuss why… Image
Read 11 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Nov 24, 2025
X’s new “About this account” feature just accidentally revealed a vast network of covert foreign influence accounts posing as Americans but operating from overseas — the most sweeping public exposure of covert influence on a major platform since 2016. Story is linked below. Image
Some of these accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers. They present themselves as American patriots, veterans, moms, truck drivers, or lifelong Republicans. Many are explicitly MAGA. But their operators are posting from overseas while shaping U.S. political narratives.
It’s not just MAGA accounts, but mostly it is. Several large anti-Trump accounts were also revealed as foreign-run, as were public health networks. The common denominator is deception: pretending to be American participants in US politics while pushing highly divisive content.
Read 12 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Oct 28, 2025
I wrote about a secret tactic shaping what you see online — one almost no one’s talking about. It’s called Moderation Sabotage, and it’s how political digital operatives overwhelm social media defenses so lies go viral before truth can catch up. Link is posted below.🧵
Imagine flooding the system so completely that moderators can’t respond in time. That’s the playbook: swamp the filters, delay enforcement, and let false or incendiary content live long enough to trend.

By the time platforms react, the damage is done.
This isn’t random chaos. It’s deliberate. Trump’s digital allies — the same architects behind Stop the Steal — have refined Moderation Sabotage into an election-year weapon. Rather than hacking the code, they’re hacking the people who keep the code honest.
Read 11 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Oct 13, 2025
NEW: AI campaigns are learning to run themselves — and using our data to do it. Without stricter safeguards, we may soon see AI controlling the very governing bodies that could enforce those safeguards in the first place..

(Link in next tweet). Image
I took 2 months off due to health problems, and when I returned, I expected to see the normal disinformation playbook in action. Indeed, that was waiting for me. But so was something else: AI is now running for office & pushing humans out of the process.

weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/ai-political…

We’ve already seen AI playing a big role in politics, including several attempts to get an AI system elected to office in order to act as the decision-maker, while humans would simply act as the body for AI’s policies and initiatives. weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/ai-political…Image
Read 9 tweets
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D Profile picture
Aug 13, 2025
The “controversy” over Sydney Sweeney is absurd and largely fake, but there’s one thing worth paying attention to — the tried and tested formula used by the right-wing outrage machine to manufacture liberal fury and then bait the left into making it a reality.
Here’s how it works:

First, invent the outrage. This usually involves picking a neutral or mildly provocative event and finding something about it to frame as being offensive to the left. In this case, the slogan (“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”). Image
Second, flood the zone. Carry out a social media blitz and manufacture the appearance of outrage by gaming the algorithm with repetitive content, which will then get pushed into trending feeds and recommended videos — creating the perception that people actually care about it. Image
Read 15 tweets

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