Russian disinformation teams targeted Robert S. Mueller III, says report prepared for Senate

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Months after President Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sights on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there.

The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram — which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal — claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups.”

Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters. The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday.

One of the reports, authored by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm Graphika, became public when The Washington Post obtained it and published its highlights Sunday. The other report was by social media research firm New Knowledge, Columbia University and Canfield Research.

Together the reports describe the Russian campaign with sweep and detail not before available. The researchers analyzed more than 10 million posts and messages on every major social media platform to understand how the Russians used American technology to build a sprawling online disinformation machine, with each piece playing a designated role while supporting the others with links and other connections.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-disinformation-teams-targeted-robert-s-mueller-iii-says-report-prepared-for-senate/2018/12/17/0e0047f6-0230-11e9-8186-4ec26a485713_story.html?utm_term=.8e6e986e6a0f&wpisrc=al_news__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1

[Docreed2003]

1. I wonder just how many were active on message boards like DU

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

2. I'm sure there were a few

I remember a number of new posters here right after Russia annexed Crimea.

[flibbitygiblets]

3. Hmmm, why would the Russians want Mueller discredited?

Jesus Christ, of course they did. The only question is whether they did it because Putin hated Hillary and wanted to sow chaos by helping elect/keep a dolt in office, or whether it was planned all along. The case for the latter builds with each passing day.

[Blue Owl]

4. Speaking of attempts to discredit Mueller...

What ever happened to that little shit-weasel Jacob Wohl and his surefire intelligence "bombshell" regarding Mueller's wild womanizing?

[Grasswire2]

5. Paul Thompson's FB investigative page was hijacked when it turned away..

...from investigation of the Clinton email fuss and changed the group name to "Public Corruption Monitor". It seems apparent that the hijackers (who shut Paul out of his own page and research) had added thousands of bots to the membership, inflating its footprint. The hijackers followed the evident protocol of the Russian social media blitz, attacking anyone who presented info about Trump corruption, etc. They changed the name back to "Clinton Email Investigation Timeline" (which falls under Paul's copyright, incidentally, as part of his Timelines). Shady maneuvering, there.