Russian Trolls Used Facebook to Get Americans to Protest Each Other

This tactic by the Russians is really nothing new since misinformation on the Internet is something long used in South Korea for political purposes:

Posing as American activists, Russian government-linked trolls created 129 Facebook events between 2015 and 2017.

On multiple occasions, the events prompted real Americans to take to the streets.

In a written statement Facebook gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Thursday, the social media network said that the events created by one Kremlin-linked troll group were seen by more than 300,000 Facebook users. About 62,500 users marked that they would attend the event, and an additional 25,800 expressed an interest in attending.

Facebook told Congress it does “not have data about the realization of these events,” but CNN has previously found evidence that the Russian group successfully convinced Americans to attend the demonstrations.

The events were organized on a range of divisive issues and were designed to pit Americans against each other.

In one case, the troll group organized and promoted two opposing events on the same day at the same location in Houston, Texas.

“Heart of Texas,” a page that posed as a pro-Texas secession organization, promoted a “Stop Islamization of Texas” protest at the opening of a library at an Islamic Center on May 21, 2016. The same troll group used another page, “United Muslims of America,” to promote a “Save Islamic Knowledge” event at the same time.

The Russian group spent $200 promoting the events on Facebook, the company told Congress last fall.

Executive director of the American-Islamic Relations in Texas, Mustafaa Carroll, told CNN that his organization had contacted the FBI about comments posted on the “Heart of Texas” page before the protest. One of them read: “Need to blow this place up. We don’t need this shit in Texas.”  [CNN]

You can read more at the link, but using trolls to create fake news and events is why the prior ROK government under President Lee Myung-bak implemented a real-name verification system for commenters to avoid false information influencing elections.  President Lee had first hand experience with this when the 2008 US Mad Cow Crisis nearly toppled his Presidency shortly after being inaugurated.  Afterwards the whole thing was proven to be fake news spread over the Internet and promoted by major media outlets to topple the President.