Gmail Political Spam, Disney Fascists and Russian Trolls

Gmail is now helping politicians spam you. Here’s how we fight back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/05/stop-political-spam-gmail/

Disney heiress slams great-uncle Walt: ‘He bordered on rabid fascism’
Disney heiress Abigail Disney ripped her great-uncle Walt Disney for being “fascist” and stoking anti-Semitism and racism when he ran the company he co-founded with her grandfather Roy O. Disney. “He bordered on rabid fascism,” the 62-year-old heiress said of Walt Disney on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. The wealthy film producer and activist spoke with Maron about her new documentary that takes aim at her family’s company, called “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” as well as her family’s battle with addiction. Disney told Maron that while her great-uncle Walt was a “chaotic genius,” he and his brother played up prejudices of the time. “They weren’t shy about delving into the stereotypes if it served them,” she said.

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Moderate’
What Russian trolls can teach us about American voters
By Anand Giridharadas
Oct 4 2022
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/russia-social-media-troll-farm-persuasion-american-unity-book/671635/>

In June 2014, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva arrived in the United States on a clandestine mission. Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was connected with Russian intelligence. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was more junior. Their trip had been well plotted: a transcontinental itinerary, SIM cards, burner phones, cameras, visas obtained under the pretense of personal travel, and, just in case, evacuation plans.

The women made stops in California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas, according to a federal indictment issued years later. Beyond that, their activities are not well known. Their mission, however, is now public knowledge: to gather evidence of conditions in the United States for a project to destabilize its political system and society, using the rather improbable weapon of millions of social-media posts.

In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness.

Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, had been founded in 2013 as an industrial troll farm, where workers were paid to write blog posts, comments on news sites, and social-media messages. Late that summer, a job posting appeared online. “Internet operators wanted!” it read, according to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “Task: posting comments at profile sites on the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks.” Plus: “PAYMENTS EVERY WEEK AND FREE MEALS!!!”

Hundreds of workers toiled in 12-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. Each had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message—reportedly three posts a day per account if Facebook was their medium, or 50 on Twitter. Managers issued detailed instructions about content and obsessed over page views, likes, and retweets.

[[[[ zuckerberg owns facebook and instagram made a fortune off hate]]]]

In the years ahead, the agency would write more than 6 million tweets, and its posts would attract 76 million engagements on Facebook and 183 million on Instagram. Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. But their common aim was to amplify the worst cultural tendencies of an age of division: writing other people off, assuming they would never change their mind, and viewing those who thought differently as needing to be resisted rather than won over.

When the IRA’s project became public knowledge, a simplistic, if seductive, story line grew up around it. “Yes, Russian Trolls Helped Elect Trump: Social media lies have real-world consequences,” read the headline of a Michelle Goldberg column in The New York Times. Aiding Donald Trump was indeed among the IRA’s objectives, but it wasn’t the mission’s focus. “The story of Russian interference was a really damaging crutch for the imagination,” the Russian American writer Masha Gessen told me not long ago. “It was something that allowed us to think about Trump as somebody from outer space—or at least from Russia—as a kind of alien body, but also an alien body from which we’re somehow miraculously going to be liberated.”

In time, a more sobering analysis emerged. The Russian mission, far from dropping something on America from outer space, had been to fertilize behaviors already flourishing on American soil. “The IRA’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy,” Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, scholars at Clemson University who became prominent analysts of Russia’s campaign, have written. “The IRA has used Trump—and many other politicians—as vehicles to further these twin goals, but it is not about Trump himself.” A report by the research firm New Knowledge provided to Senate investigators described similar goals: “to undermine citizens’ trust in government, exploit societal fractures, create distrust in the information environment, blur the lines between reality and fiction, undermine trust among communities, and erode confidence in the democratic process.”

When I began to read the posts myself, I saw even more clearly how the Russians had gone about this work. They had done more than fan the flames of division. They had encouraged the view that the basic activity of democratic life—the changing of minds—had become futile. The troll farm wanted Americans to regard people with different views as immovable, brainwashed, disloyal, repulsive. “The IRA knows that in political warfare disgust is a much more powerful tool than anger,” Linvill and Warren wrote. “Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.”

Americans didn’t need outside help to see one another in these ways. The culture of the write-off, of mutual contempt and dismissal, could be found everywhere you looked. If anything, this attitude was a rare point of commonality across left and right. The ease with which the Russian government exploited these tendencies is frightening, but it also, perhaps, points to a way out: If Americans are so easily manipulated in the direction of enmity and sniping and rage, might they also be more open to persuasion than we tend to assume? If Russian trolls could pull us apart, can we bring ourselves back together?

Crystal Johnson is an actual person, a real-estate agent in Georgia. I spoke with her once on the phone. When I explained that I was looking into how her identity had been stolen and weaponized by Russian intelligence, she hung up and stopped answering my calls.

Johnson tweeted occasionally under the handle @CrystalSellsLA. Her profile photo shows a Black woman in her 30s or 40s with short blond hair. She’s smiling widely, dressed crisply in a black blazer and a white shirt. She looks like someone you would trust to find you a home. She posted a combination of real-estate insights and inspirational quotations. “Resale homes sales R up,” she wrote back in 2012. “As we learned from the recent bubble that burst, a healthy housing market puts many pairs of hands to work.” On another occasion: “Good morning! There is so much we have to be thankful for.” Even Heracleitus made a cameo: “The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.”

In February of that year, a Twitter account with the handle @Crystal1Johnson began to tweet—and it tweeted precisely what @CrystalSellsLA was tweeting. On the first day of 2013, the real Crystal Johnson wished the world Happy New Year—as did her clone. That would be nearly the end of its mimicry, though. The account went silent for two years. And then suddenly it became one of the most influential accounts operated by the IRA’s troll farm.

The second week of December 2015 was a tense one. Trump, still a relatively new presidential candidate, had proposed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Political observers started saying that his campaign was more than a curiosity or a carnival, that it recalled the beginnings of some of the most dangerous movements in history. On December 10, @Crystal1Johnson was back in action. “#BlackLivesMatter,” the account declared. @Crystal1Johnson would tweet 11 more times that day, a major increase relative to the real Crystal’s posts, and in this noticeably different vein. “KKK was terrorizing us decades before #ISIS appeared,” it thundered. “But in America #KKK still is legal!!” Crystal1 also weighed in on a television remake of The Wiz, a remix of The Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast. “So white people see #racism in an all black cast but not when black people are victims of #policebrutality?”

A new Crystal Johnson had emerged, less interested in real-estate advice than in deep-rooted racial injustices. That first day, @Crystal1Johnson received only a handful of likes and appears to have acquired a single follower. But over the next two years, the account sent another 8,000 tweets and garnered more than 56,000 followers, putting it in the top 1 percent of Twitter users globally. Measured by retweets, Crystal1 was the second-most-powerful Twitter user in the entire sprawling Russian effort, with some 3.8 million repostings.

Linvill and Warren, the Clemson scholars, put me on to Crystal1 as an exemplar of the IRA’s left-leaning trolls. But they also recommended that I look into another of the agency’s top performers, its tenth-most-retweeted account—a right-leaning troll named Jenna Abrams.

[snip]