Скачать или смотреть Russian UPDATE - Not Fake News - Troll Factory targeting US found in Africa

The Russians never quit. Now a Russian troll factory has been found in West Africa. The factory was outsourced to Ghanaian and Nigerian operatives. That is the word from Facebook and Twitter and each removed the troll account. And it’s the first time a troll network has been found running from Africa.

Apparently the network was composed of 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts. This is small from the standpoint of troll factories but experts say its only because it was disrupted in the early stages of building an audience. Bringing me to our slay word byzantine for characterized by a devious and usually surreptitious manner of operation. This was a very byzantine operation….but apparently no so much that they didn’t get caught!

The trolls posted about topics like black history, black excellence, fashion, celebrity gossip, news and events related to famous Americans, LGBTQ issues….and broader topics like the coronavirus, oppression and injustice, including police brutality.

The local African operatives used fake accounts and managed pages posing as non-government organizations or personal blogs and posted in groups. It seems the content was a bit subtle because they steered clear of explicitly political postings. Experts say they were trying to grow the audience.

The sites were found to have links to EBLA, an NGO in Ghana, and to persons associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). The Russians have tried this before. In the cold war they tried to cause trouble by writing anonymous racist hate letters to African diplomats in New York, and pretending the letters came from American white supremacists.

In the 2016 elections Robert Mueller noted that the Russians had trolls working out of a troll factory in St Petersburg posing as a grassroots group called Black Matters US. And in February 2017, a Russian troll using the persona Black Fist even hired a self-defense instructor in New York to give classes to African Americans.