How ordinary Americans spread Russian propaganda on PINTEREST.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, G-mail, Yahoo, Pinterest, Reddit, 4Chan . . . .
Where wasn't Russia propaganda being spread?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/11/how-russian-content-ended-up-on-pinterest/?utm_term=.35d436308383
Few would associate it with politics – let alone Russian trolls. But in the run-up to the 2016 election, the site became a repository for thousands of political posts created by Russian operatives seeking to shape public opinion and foment discord in U.S. society, the company acknowledged Wednesday.
Russian operatives don’t appear to have posted directly on Pinterest, but their influence spread to the site through users who came across Russian content elsewhere and unwittingly “pinned” it onto their Pinterest scrap boards.
“We believe the fake Facebook content was so sophisticated that it tricked real Americans into saving it to Pinterest,” said Pinterest head of public policy Charlie Hale. “We’ve removed the content brought to our attention and continue to investigate.”
San Francisco-based Pinterest is the latest in a growing list of Silicon Valley companies that hosted or were exploited directly by the Russian disinformation campaign. The acknowledgement by Pinterest also highlights an essential truth of the internet that helped bolster the Russian agenda -- once content appears on a site or social network, it can be shared across the web by ordinary Americans in unpredictable ways and reach a far broader audience than its initial readership.
SNIP