Heads up: Russians boosting Franken story per Hamilton 68 [Updated RE: Pro-Franken disinformation]

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Thursday November 16, 2017 · 1:22 PM PST

2017/11/16 · 13:22

Hamilton 68, from the Alliance for Securing Democracy, has collated a ton of data on Russian “Active Measures” troll networks and the useful idiots who boost the St Petersburg Signal.

They’ve been able to determine with surprising accuracy exactly what stories the Russians are pushing on a particular day.

They’re currently poisoning our national discourse by trying to make the discussion about Al Franken’s abhorrent behavior as toxic as possible. From what I’ve observed, it’s mostly comments about how the left is defending Franken, while sending in counter-bots to actually defend Franken.

I won’t post direct links to those troll accounts because I don’t want to engage in a witch hunt, and the tools here are only about 95% accurate.

World-wide, the Russians are continuing to push a false narrative that the United States has given the Islamic State supplies and weaponry (when in reality the equipment was captured from the Iraqi Military during their retreat from the Sunni Triangle.) They’ve gone so far as to use images from video games as “evidence” for that false narrative.

For further reading on troll and bot networks on social media, Medium has a great article here.

If you’re a twitter user who doesn’t want to engage with either left wing or right wing Russian botnets and trolls, a data scientist has created an AI-based tool for identifying individual accounts from those networks here.

Thursday, Nov 16, 2017 · 10:06:40 PM +00:00 · OllieGarkey

So it appears that Russian bots are pushing a particular narrative that Franken’s photograph was staged:

BREAKING NOW:

Al Franken photo staged according to photographer who took the photo.

Photographer: [S]he was playing dead and SHE wanted him to Ã¢ÂÂreviveÃ¢ÂÂ her. I took the picture it was a funny moment everyone was smiling having a good time

Leeann Tweeden is a trump supporter. pic.twitter.com/DXAnp18XbW
— Aiden Benjamin (@Feisal_Hagi) November 16, 2017

The main tweet people are quoting comes from “Aiden Benjamin” whose twitter handle is “@Feisal_Hagi.” (Tweet Archived here: archive.is/...) Checking their twitter feed, they had no real political commentary until February, they just reblogged a bunch of random sports clips. So no comments during the election, the Women’s March, etc. After that there’s some poorly-written tweets about politics, none of which attract much attention. One of which calls for firing Colbert over something I don’t remember. The account has slowly ramped up its political posts.

The avatar for this account appeared elsewhere online, and ultimately seems to have been taken from a VK (Russian Facebook) account:

archive.is/…

Several other Russian Language social media accounts also use this image.

The Make Adverbs Great Again networks rate Aidan Benjamin 7/10 as a Russian troll or bot. Anything about 6/10 is considered a match.

Please, do not trust this story about the USO Photographer until a credible source publishes it.

I very badly want it to be true. But it does not currently appear to be true.

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Heads up: Russians boosting Franken story per Hamilton 68 [Updated RE: Pro-Franken disinformation]

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