Russian Trolls Found Amplifying U.S. Republican Charge Against FBI

January 20, 2018

Donald Trump Jr. (left) and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Russian trolls have helped create a big swell of support online for a move by U.S. Republicans to force the release of a classified document that they say provides evidence of bias against U.S. President Donald Trump at the Justice Department. Researchers at the Alliance for Security Democracy project, which has been tracking a network of 600 Twitter accounts it says are controlled by the Kremlin, said late on January 19 that the trolls drove up use of the Twitter hashtag #releasethememo by 315,000 percent over 24 hours, greatly amplifying demands by Republicans for release of the highly classified congressional memo. "I've never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it," said Bret Schafer, an analyst with the alliance's Hamilton 68 project. The surge in online activity in support of the conservative Republican cause came as Twitter announced it has identified and shut down an additional 1,062 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg entity often described as a "troll farm" connected with the Kremlin. That brings the total to 3,814. The Alliance for Securing Democracy says the 600 Twitter feeds it monitors include accounts from Russian state-run media RT and Sputnik, as well as other accounts that are consistently pro-Russian and amplify Russian government themes.

The Russian accounts have joined a chorus calling for release of the classified memo led by Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, and other prominent Republicans. At issue in the campaign is a classified memo that legislators on the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee say was commissioned by the committee's chairman, Representative Devin Nunes. The committee's Democrats in a joint statement called the document "a misleading set of talking points attacking the FBI" and drawing from "highly classified" documents that they said the government will never agree to release. "Not surprisingly, the GOP campaign to attack the FBI now has been joined by the same forces that made common cause during the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks, [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange, and a multitude of online Russian bots are now involved in promoting the effort," the Democratic statement said. Republicans have said the memo shows the FBI and Justice Department are biased against the president and, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, improperly surveilled members of Trump's 2016 campaign. U.S. intelligence officials have denied that they conducted any improper surveillance.

Click to expand...

Rogue Valley said:

Russian Trolls Found Amplifying U.S. Republican Charge Against FBI

---

Unsurprisingly, the Russian troll networks are still assisting Trump and his family.

Related: Hamilton 68 | Tracking Russian Influence Operations On Twitter

Click to expand...