”Facebook was the indispensable messenger” for Russia in their hacking of our democracy this past November, media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote last week, “even more obvious now after Wednesday’s news that Facebook sold ads during the campaign to a Russian ‘troll farm,’ targeting American voters with ‘divisive social and political messages’ that fit right in with Donald Trump’s campaign strategy.”
But now, the Daily Beast reports there’s also evidence that Russia went beyond spreading fake news and used Facebook’s event management tool to “remotely organize and promote political protests in the U.S.,” including an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho in August 2016. This is “the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action”:
Much of the Russian Facebook propaganda campaign has since been deleted. But bits and pieces remain visible in search engine caches, including a 2016 notice on Facebook Events—the site’s event management and invitation tool—announcing an August 27 rally in a rural Idaho town known to welcome refugees.
“Due to the town of Twin Falls, Idaho, becoming a center of refugee resettlement, which led to the huge upsurge of violence towards American citizens, it is crucial to draw society's attention to this problem,” the event notice began. The three hour protest was titled “Citizens before refugees”, and would be held at the City Council Chambers beginning at 11:00 am. The notice provided the street address and ended with a fiery exhortation.
“We must stop taking in Muslim refugees! We demand open and thorough investigation of all the cases regarding Muslim refugees! All government officials, who are covering up for these criminals, should be fired!”
The event was “hosted” by “SecuredBorders,” a putative U.S. anti-immigration community that was outed in March as a Russian front.
Event turnout bombed just like it did at Trump’s inauguration, but as Fortune notes, “the action taken by SecuredBorders clearly amounts to an incitement to real-world political action by American citizens during the election campaign.” One former FBI agent told the Daily Beast that “this is the next step. The objective of influence is to create behavior change. The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that Russia created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.”