Russia Targeted African Americans in its Plot to Undermine Democracy & Help Trump Steal the 2016 Election.

“Two explosive reports detail how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump: They Were Released To The Public on Monday.  Watch Malcolm Nance’s Appearance on @11thHour with Brian Williams, as he breaks down both reports in detail.”

~ L. Renee’

We’ve all known for quite some time that Russia has interfered in our election system, and more so in the 2016 Presidential election, when they specifically targeted African-Americans on all of the social media platforms and tried tirelessly to suppress and block Democratic voters, specifically, African American voters, according to two major reports released by the United States Senate. 

The Senate commissioned each report to outline and provide the public a better understanding of the depth of Russia’s interference in the Presidential election of 2016.  The public, for the first time, will get to see one of the reports, that was conducted by a private research firm, and will be released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, just 15 days before Democrats are set to take over the House.

“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. It also indicates that the reach was much wider spread than originally thought.

The report, gives credibility to what Special Counsel Mueller, The FBI, The Intelligence agencies and the Senate Intelligence Committees have been saying all along – That the majority of the social media posts being used, specifically focused on race, and designed to harm the Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton, and put Trump in office.  The ultimate goal however; was not just the Presidency, but to wreak havoc on American democracy and divide this country in a way that would be almost impossible to repair after Trump was gone.

So here’s what the study revealed.  There were 10 million tweets, over 100,000 Instagram posts and over 60,000 Facebook posts, and about 1,00 videos posted, which were analyzed by the report researchers.  They found that the posts originated from The IRA – The Internet Research Agency, which is Russian government- linked.  Remember folks, these are the same internet trolls who were indicted by Mueller earlier this year.   You can read the Department of Justice Indictment, in case you forgot, or want to refresh your memory for context.

What’s most alarming of all the social media posts analyzed is the common theme, they specifically targeted African Americans to lead the dissent.

According to the report,

“The most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets, while other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively, with dozens”.

Damn!  That’s pretty sick even for Putin.   What this says is that these designated accounts ran by Russians, under direct orders, made every possible attempt to reach out to and convince Americans to become patsy’s or “assets”, by using overt tactics, for example.  They would offer certain clothing or merchandise with slogans on them, targeting The Black Lives Matter movement and religion.  Some of them would spread false narratives of voter fraud in the Democratic party, while the majority of them focused on discouraging minorities from voting.

If you think about this. The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012.  The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for us. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.)

So I’d say, it worked. So does the report. New Knowledge with data provided by the Senate committee from tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google parent company Alphabet. 

It should be noted that Google declined to comment and a Twitter spokesperson claimed the company has “made significant strides to counter manipulation of our service.

A trolling taxonomy

“Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the report authors have concluded. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.”

The second report, which was completed by researchers at the University of Oxford, and called, The “Computational Progaganda Research Project”, gives us a pretty exhaustive view of Russian interference on these platforms, despite what they have said in front of Congress and to the public.  Why? Come on.  We all see the tens of thousands of live bot/troll accounts out there, that can’t wait to pounce and stir up trouble.  Not only that, there have been reports that these accounts are specifically tied to the IRA (Internet Research Agency), again, check the indictment above, so Jack and Twitter and Zuckerberg and Facebook/Instagram are well aware of who these accounts are, what they are doing, yet they remain.  My question is WHY? What’s the point if we already have proof from Mueller, why are there ANY of these accounts left?

“With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other push-back, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future,”

~Report Researchers Statement

“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in congressional testimony,” the researchers wrote. They added “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground”.