Back in September, the following tweet appeared in response to the Working Families Party endorsement of Sanders and Warren:
The @helen_manfred account is a troll account attempting to sow discord among Democrats by pitting different supporters against each other. Here’s a comparison:
(Note that they replaced the white guy with rapper Charlemagne the God.)
As the Washington Post reports, Leaundra Ross’s attempt at showing how bad a fake it was led to people going after the Warren campaign:
Within several hours, the tweet expressing Ross’s outrage had gained well over 1,000 interactions, including a string of comments assailing the Warren campaign for the apparent misrepresentation. Ross warned her followers that the photoshop was too poor to be an official production of the campaign. But some of her followers had already drawn their own conclusions. It was reposted by other Harris supporters, some of whom blamed Warren directly. “These are so much worse than her crazy lies about her plans,” one user wrote.
Meanwhile, Ross did not realize she had spread disinformation targeting a Democratic candidate.
“I posted it because it was funny and laughable and looked fake,” Ross said, speculating that the edited photo may have come from a well-meaning supporter when, in fact, a review of the account’s posts makes clear it is posing as a Warren fan to sow doubts about her campaign and spotlight apparent faults with her candidacy — as well as those of other 2020 hopefuls. “Warren 2020,” the user’s bio reads.
We are going to have to be better at dealing with this. We have to check sources. We have to look for original images. We need to assume that anything that feeds our biases is suspect. We can’t let them divide us.
Edit:
subtropolis makes an excellent point: We need to watch blaming candidates for the actions of people who claim to support them. Not only do candidates not have much control over anyone outside of their campaigns, but we we will end up doing exactly what a troll wanted by posting something divisive.