Russian Propaganda Veterans Push Candace Owens' 'Blexit' Campaign
Source: Daily Beast
We’re not saying that Russia helped make #Blexit trend, but Twitter accounts with a history a pushing Kremlin fake news are playing a disproportionate role in amplifying the call for African American voters to hop on the Trump Train.
Blexit, the brainchild of right-wing personality Candace Owens, is a nascent movement meant to urge black voters to leave the Democratic Party.
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It turns out that approximately 40,000, or 16 percent, of the Blexit tweets we collected came from accounts that previously pushed Kremlin propaganda in one of two key Russian disinformation campaigns: one attempting to exonerate the Syrian government in a deadly chemical weapons attack, another targeting last year’s presidential election in France in support of a failed eleventh-hour intervention by Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency.
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Our monitoring captured 78,134 accounts pushing Blexit. In total, 12 percent of those accounts, championed those earlier Russian disinformation efforts.
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Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-propaganda-veterans-push-candace-owens-blexit-campaign
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" Blexit nonprofit, founded in 2016 by Me’Lea Connelly, is an organization based upon the nationwide movement for Black people to stop supporting financial institutions and companies that cause Black people pain. These institutions include banks that give subprime mortgages, payday lending companies that exploit Black workers, and public schools that fail the needs of Black students. Connelly told the Daily Dot that she was flying back from studying a cooperative community in Italy when she was alerted about Owens’ usage of “Blexit,” and the vitriol that ensued as a result of Kanye’s public exit from politics.
“People who support our work reached out, really concerned and confused, and that’s when we kind of realized this was really blowing up online and that it was going to be a major issue for us,” Connelly said.
Like Owens’ usage of the word, the nonprofit Blexit means “Black exit,” and is a play off the 2016 vote for Britain to leave the U.K., Brexit. However, much unlike Owens’ movement, the nonprofit isn’t encouraging the exit of Black people for any political party—in fact, the nonprofit is nonpartisan. Connelly’s nonprofit encourages Black people to leave financial institutions and companies that use Black funds to further oppress Black people economically.
“Blexit is all about finding the economic root of oppressive systems and finding ways to exit them by creating replacement systems that actually work for us,” Connelly said. “I think that the concept of it being around leaving a political party is shallow, it’s misguided, and it misses the mark of what the Black community truly needs.”
Connelly said that the nonprofit, while launched in Minnesota in 2016, is rooted in a nationwide online movement that began in 2015, and also promotes economic freedom from anti-Black institutions. Over time, individual social media accounts began using Blexit as a hashtag to spread the message, with celebrities such as Killer Mike encouraging other Black people to take their money to institutions that will support them"
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/blexit-minnesota-nonprofit-melea-connelly-candace-owens/
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