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Thousands of messages anyway, with inflammatory language, full of false or misleading data. Spread online to convince specific basins of digital users that the number of coronavirus victims in the United States has been artificially inflated, that voting by mail is a scam (28 million mail ballots lost in 4 elections: false according to official sources) and that Joe Biden is a puppet in the hands of a radical left pushing the United States toward socialism.
Deceptive campaigns managed by robots who pretend to be flesh and blood users? Again, foreign attacks on the American electoral system like those launched in 2016 by hackers from the Internet Investigation Agency in St. Petersburg, linked to the Russian secret services? Or the work of “hipsters” like the Macedonian kids who later found a way to make money online by demonizing Hillary Clinton?
Maybe none of this. By the way, since then, social media has created electronic barriers to avoid the recurrence of attacks from the outside. In recent days, the FBI has uncovered new Russian plots, but the government has downplayed it, preferring to blame Beijing rather than blame Moscow. However, for now there is no evidence of a massive offensive.
In fact, experts have been warning for years that infiltration techniques are evolving rapidly.. So now it turns out that the new factory of electoral disinformation trolls is not in Russia but in Phoenix, Arizona (a Republican state that Trump fears losing), and that it is not run by foreign agents, but by Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old leader. Young Conservatives: An activist very close to Trump who entrusted him with the keynote address of the recent Republican Party convention.
Kirk is the director of Turning Point USA, an association of young Republican activists. founded eight years ago by a marketing expert, Bill Montgomery, who had intuited the dialectical talent of then 18-year-old Charlie. The campaign based on thousands of messages spread by Arizona and apparently coming from individuals is orchestrated by Turning Point Action, the operational arm of the association that, to escape the anti-robot filters created by social networks, has recruited a network of children (many even minors), paid to broadcast these standard messages to thousands of users.
It was not the big names of the network that realized this, but a newspaper, he Washington Post, who, upon noticing certain anomalies on the web, began to call the children, their parents and the republican association itself, discovering the plot. When he reported it, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram suspended dozens of accounts and Twitter denounced “manipulation of the platform.”
In short, the mechanism is similar to that of trolls.But the use of real paid people to saturate the message network has allowed this digital political attack to escape the surveillance of social networks. Discovered, the Republican youth organization defended itself arguing that what the press denounced is only a case of “genuine political activism of the young people that exist.
And that they are also a bit unscrupulous: they continue to minimize the risks of the pandemic despite the fact that its founder, Montgomery, was killed in late July by the coronavirus.
September 16, 2020 (change September 16, 2020 | 21:45)
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