The Russians are back! Well, we guess they never left if you count Agent Orange and his gang of hate, but according to data scientists it seems like “foreign actors” have taken to social media to once again spread misinformation campaigns about your favorite Democratic 2020 candidate.
Politico is reporting that top Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are the targets in misinformation campaigns that include memes, hashtags, and “distortions of their positions.” Why? Because these social media distorters want to divide the democratic vote if not all together discourage people from voting for anyone not named Donald Trump in the coming 2020 election.
“It looks like the 2020 presidential primary is going to be the next battleground to divide and confuse Americans,” said Brett Horvath, one of the founders of Guardians.ai, a tech company that works with a consortium of data scientists, academics and technologists to disrupt cyberattacks and protect pro-democracy groups from information warfare. “As it relates to information warfare in the 2020 cycle, we’re not on the verge of it — we’re already in the third inning.”
Though it seems like the average person would be able to see through such tactics, Hillary Clinton knows all too well that this is an effective method as Evangelical Christians are convinced that Jesus Christ wanted Donald Trump to be President while Satan was rooting for Hillary Clinton. That’s not even a joke. That was a popular meme amongst the religious right that had Russian origins according to investigators last year.
Now that Donald Trump’s popularity is in the gutter and his chances of re-election are slipping through his grabby fingers, foreign actors have once again taken to the internet to slander any and everyone that poses the biggest threat to his “Presidency.” Unfortunately people still fall for the jig and chances are they’ll continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
“Moderates and centrists and Democratic candidates still don’t understand what happened in 2016, and they didn’t realize, like Hillary Clinton, that she wasn’t just running a presidential campaign, she was involved in a global information war,” Horvath said. “Democratic candidates and presidential candidates in the center and on the right who don’t understand that aren’t just going to have a difficult campaign, they’re going to allow their campaign to be an unwitting amplifier of someone else’s attempts to further divide Americans.”
Stay woke, y’all.