{"id":12558,"date":"2018-02-21T22:48:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T22:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=12558"},"modified":"2018-02-21T22:48:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T22:48:00","slug":"the-media-today-are-russian-trolls-behind-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2018\/02\/21\/the-media-today-are-russian-trolls-behind-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"The media today: Are Russian trolls behind everything?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted<\/a> more than a dozen Russian agents and several Russian corporations as part of his investigation into interference in the 2016 US election, it’s tempting to believe the problem has been solved. But while the “troll factory” known as the Internet Research Agency appears to be defunct, that doesn’t mean trolls have been stopped in their tracks. If anything, in fact, they seem to be popping up almost everywhere: The New York Times<\/a><\/em> reported that Twitter accounts with links to Russia moved quickly to take advantage of the attention focused on the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida — posting hundreds of updates related to the event and to the topic of gun control under popular hashtags.<\/p>\n

How extensive or influential this was, however, is unclear. The Times<\/em> relied in part on data from Hamilton68<\/a>, a site which tracks the behavior of a range of Russian accounts, but the site’s conclusions have been questioned by some. The dashboard of alleged activity was created by The Alliance For Securing Democracy<\/a>, which in turn is associated with the German Marshall Fund. According to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, the Alliance and the Fund are backed by<\/a> notorious right-wing warmongers such as Bill Kristol and Mike Chertoff, and their conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. Others have also raised concerns: The Russia-focused news site Meduza notes Hamilton68 won’t say which accounts<\/a> it follows, and in some cases they appear to just be accounts set up by actual Russian entities such as the broadcaster Russia Today.<\/p>\n

Russian trolls seem to have become everyone’s favorite excuse for just about any negative outcome. Newsweek<\/em> and the site RawStory, for example, both ran with<\/a> pieces that claimed<\/a> former Senator Al Franken’s resignation after sexual harassment allegations was driven by Russian trolls hijacking the #MeToo campaign. These reports were also based at least in part on conclusions by Hamilton68, which Newsweek<\/em> said called the anti-Franken campaign “officially a Russian intelligence operation.” But fact-checking by Snopes.com found some holes<\/a> in the story, including the fact that a piece<\/a> by Ijeoma Oluo was supposedly part of the campaign and was promoted by trolls, even though Oluo told Snopes her article was written after Franken had already decided to resign.<\/p>\n

Even New Yorker<\/em> writer Adrian Chen, who wrote what is probably the definitive profile<\/a> of the Russian “troll factory” known as the Internet Research Agency, has actually been down-playing the influence of the IRA to some extent<\/a>. In an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chen said that while some commentators have compared the troll campaign to Pearl Harbor and other major global events, it was “essentially just a social-media marketing campaign” and therefore probably not worth plunging the US into a state of national emergency. Atlantic<\/em> writer Alexis Madrigal seems to concur: he says the Russian troll campaign<\/a> “wasn’t that sophisticated,” and that if the IRA had been a Silicon Valley startup “they probably would not be picking up a fresh round of venture capital” because their methods were so haphazard.<\/p>\n

Here’s some further reading on the topic of Russian trolls and their alleged activity in the US:<\/p>\n