I just read the following comment, which really got my hackles up:
There is a new movement “walk away ...liberals saying they are tired of political correctness...this is probably a fake ad by Russians and or republicans...trump has noticed it and will pounce on it and create more confusion and chaos among Democrats...spread the word!!
h/t cedarchick14ever
It’s been diaried here before, but as a refresher (from July):
Kremlin-affiliated trolls have subversively co-opted #WalkAway as an influence campaign, data appears to show. The hashtag is boosting visibility for a right-wing-hyped non-movement of disenchanted liberals who are supposedly abandoning the Democratic Party in a bid to breed division.
Data available through Hamilton 68, an analysis project focused on monitoring agitprop and backed by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, shows that swarms of Russian troll accounts made #WalkAway one of the highest ranking hashtags on Twitter in the past 48 hours.
More*:
The pro-Trump Internet is really good at convincing its audience that virality signals popular opinion, that its movement is and always will be #winning. In this case, #WalkAway is the answer to the possibility of a Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. It doesn’t need to be true to be effective. After all, the hashtag has now become an article in The Washington Post.
* Reprinted from WaPo
The campaign is still active; this month, Politifact debunked the viral lie that Dems were switching parties in Pennsylvania, though their conclusion isn’t as robust as I’d like it to be:
The Republican Party of Pennsylvania has encouraged disillusioned Democrats to renounce the party, mailing voters registration forms in September that urged Democrats to "#WalkAway from their Party’s run to the socialist left" and which linked the party to the anti-fascist or antifa movement.
"The Pennsylvania Republican Party wants to let disillusioned Democrats know they have a home in the Republican Party, which stands for limited government, respect for the rule of law, and fiscal accountability," reads a statement from the Pennsylvania Republican Party announcing the mailer campaign.
[…] So, yes, Democrats are going Republican, Republicans are going Democrat, but other voters are adding or changing affiliations, too, and more of them are going blue.
More evidence that this is not a legitimate Democratic movement but a right-wing campaign: using the search engine of your choice, turn off the option for “personalized results” that use your search history to suggest results designed to appeal to you. Then, using the default non-personalized search algorithm, search on “walk away movement.” Almost all the results that promote the movement are from RW sites. Duck Duck Go provided me with the following results:
Townhall, gods-kingdom-ministries, breitbart, legainsurrection, theepochtimes, patriotretort — these are the sites promoting “walk away,” not Democratic or progressive sites. But apparently, some people are falling for garbage like this:
If you hear anything like this from friends/family, please disabuse them of the notion that this is a real movement by Democrats — it’s not!
It is absolutely vital that we counter this method of discouraging Democrats from turning out to vote!