There’s a mountain of evidence that the Russian trolls (around whom our politics now somehow revolve) operated like standard spammers, piggybacking on viral content to push their own agendas. That meant everything from pro and anti-Trump rallies, to fake Black Lives Matter accounts, pipeline protests and anything that was likely to tap into an interest group potentially sympathetic to their agenda.
Like pro and anti-vaccines.
Russian trolls weren’t just trying to cause division in U.S. politics. A new study shows that they were also trying to stoke divides in one of the country’s most heated debates around public health: vaccinations.
Russia-linked social media bots pushed divisive speech and misinformation on Twitter on both sides of the preexisting vaccine debate, according to research led by George Washington Universityand published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
“These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” the study’s authors said.
Nonsense.
Wedge issue, yes. Promoting discord, I doubt it.
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
Want more BFT? Leave us a voicemail on our page or follow us on Twitter @BFT_Podcast and Facebook @BluntForceTruthPodcast. We want to hear from you! There’s no better place to get the #BluntForceTruth.
