In the above report Rachel Maddow highlights that Russia used multiple fake Facebook groups that were directly racial or focused on wedge issues such as “Blactivist”, “United Muslims for America”, “Heart of Texas”, ”Defend the 2nd”, ”LGBT United” and “Secured Borders” to fan the flames of division in America to benefit Trump. These six groups alone received 340 Million views combined, which is still only the tip of the Iceberg since Facebook has admitted that there were over 450 of these types of false accounts and groups.
Details are as follows:
For six of the sites that have been made public — Blacktivists, United Muslims of America, Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas, Secured Borders and LGBT United — Albright found that the content had been “shared” 340 million times. That’s from a tiny sliver of the 470 accounts that have been made public. Even if those sites were unusually effective compared to the 464 others, Albright’s findings still suggest a total reach well into the billions of “shares” on Facebook.
The terminology is important here. For the purposes of these metrics, a “share” is essentially how often a post may have made its way into somebody’s Facebook “news feed” — without determining whether any of these users actually read the post. Another metric, called “interactions,” counts something narrower but more important -- the number of times individual users acted on what they had read by sharing a post with their Facebook “friends,” hitting the "like" button, making a comment or posting an emoji symbol.
That measurement for those six accounts, Albright's research showed, was 19.1 million. That means that more people had direct “interactions” with regular posts from just six accounts than saw the ads from all 470 pages and accounts that Facebook has identified as controlled by the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency.
When you have a bifurcation of news sources for some people who’ve been repeatedly told that the “Main Stream media is biased against conservatives” those regular news sources are rejected and these alternatives — which appear to be generated by real grass roots Americans, when in reality some from Youtube were foreign nationals from Nigeria posing as Black Lives Matter activists — may be the only media sources some people listen to, when in fact they were Russian paid propagandists.
According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.”
www.thedailybeast.com/...
These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences.
Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time.
Similarly the Facebook Group “Heart of Texas” was also a front group for Russia which was used to stoke anti-Muslim propaganda and foment a seccessionist anti-Clinton frenzy.
(CNN) On May 21 2016, a handful of people turned out to protest the opening of a library at an Islamic Center in Houston, Texas. Two held up a banner proclaiming #WhiteLivesMatter. A counter-protest began across the street; video shows a noisy but non-violent confrontation.
The rally -- called "Stop Islamization of Texas" -- was called and promoted by a Facebook page called Heart of Texas, which had wrongly alleged that the Islamic library had received public funding. But the Heart of Texas page listed no contacts in the Lone Star state. In fact, it was operated by a "Troll Factory" called the Internet Research Agency thousands of miles away in St Petersburg Russia, CNN has learned.
… Neither the Facebook page nor a companion Twitter account @ItsTimeToSecede is still accessible. The link between Heart of Texas and the Russian campaign was
previously reported by Business Insider.
@ItsTimeToSecede appears to have begun life in November 2015. The last time another user tagged the account was on August 29th of this year, about the same time the Facebook page was suspended. Twitter would not comment on why @ItsTimeToSecede had been taken down.
The Heart of Texas Facebook page had some 249,000 likes shortly before it was suspended. Its posts, some of which have been retrieved by CNN, included diatribes against refugees, conspiracy theories about the death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and Islamophobic sentiment. One post called for 'No More Mosques in America.'
So they pretended to be on the “left” as members of BLM and they pretended to be on “the right” as secessionist Texans — when they were neither — but that doesn’t mean they did get a ton of views and had a potential impact.