fuck therapy i’m becoming a knight
Yall i just got an email from tumblr saying I interacted with accounts made by the IRA …… is this even real????
The internet is wild
Im literally imagining some government worker in russia logging onto tumblr.edu and thinking to themselves “better change my url to ‘black-galaxy-magic’ to stay young n hip and relevant with the youth of america”
sooooo let’s break it down then because the fact that tumblr sent this email is mega important
if yall haven’t been living under a rock for the last year and a half, you may have heard that trump won the election. and you may have also heard that trump was helped out by russia in a ton of ways. one of those ways was by the russian troll farm, the internet research agency (IRA). there were 84 accounts on tumblr spreading anti-hillary propaganda and general discontent, mainly targeting POC and “socially aware” youth. some of those accounts were HUGELY influential, “4mysquad” being one of the top ones with tons of followers and popular posts.
a lot of them started with relatively innocent, pro-POC posts to gain a following, before moving on to anti-police, anti-hillary, and general anti-establishment to create distrust in the only major-party candidate against trump. like I said, many of the accounts were hugely influential so their posts spread FAR. all that visibility led to increased voter apathy, meaning less voter turnout and fewer people voting against trump. and tumblr was silent on this after the official indictment of the IRA, until literally just yesterday.
so to sum up, the email you and a ton of other people got is saying that you were following and sharing posts from russian pro-trump propaganda blogs. i’d ask that you PLEASE reblog this, because it’s super important that everyone who got this email knows why they got it, knows what it means, and hopefully knows what they might be able to do better in the future
This isn’t the kind of thing I normally reblog, but I think it’s vitally important for Tumblr to know how propaganda works, and that it’s a whole lot more than Fox News posts being shared by old people on Facebook. Malicious people will play on the fears and prejudices of a community, any community, to subtly manipulate public opinion their way – whether the fears they’re playing on are fear of change, fear of the establishment, fear of immigrants, fear of the police, fear of old people, fear of young people … you get the idea.
I went through the list carefully and the only one I could find that rang a bell was one that posted about “Black Lives Matter”. I am very suspicious about just what checks were done. Did tumblr just send this to everyone? There’s no way known I’ve ever posted pro-Trump posts.
But no, Beth, that’s the point! That’s what makes this so insidious. You didn’t post pro-Trump posts. Nobody did. (Well, some people might’ve, but not the vast majority.) That’s not the kind of propaganda that’s going to appeal to and undermine people on the left.
These blogs masquerade as perfectly innocuous left-leaning blogs. They post things of interest to Tumblr’s mostly-young, mostly-lefty crowd - memes and cute cat videos, relatively ordinary political stuff that a lot of people reblog like Black Lives Matter posts and Dakota Pipeline posts and so forth. And into this mix of relatively normal Tumblr posts, they seed the poison: posts spreading slander about the political candidate the left would normally vote for (Hilary Clinton in this case), posts undermining your faith in the voting process, posts making a case for throwing your vote to a third-party candidate, posts suggesting that there’s no need to turn out to vote because Trump obviously can’t win so you don’t have to bother, posts suggesting that the system is so broken that anarchy is the only option. Or just a steady diet of posts about how The System Is Awful (e.g. 24/7 BLM) so you end up feeling like there’s no point, it’s never going to change so why bother trying?
The point is to make the left dispirited and apathetic, or convinced that the outcome of the election is a foregone conclusion, so they won’t bother voting.
There’s no way to know if it made a difference. But they certainly think it did. So they WILL try this again, probably are already trying this again - not just with the U.S., but with any country where they want to influence the political process.
You can’t ever completely stop yourself from being influenced, but at least knowing how it works is one way of guarding against it.
quarantine is watching an entire series and a movie in one day and also getting a nap in too somehow because the day is simultaneously 5 minutes long and the length of chile
there are only two kinds of people in the world:
those who have watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and loved it
and those that will watch it and love it
OH NO. Yeah very thirst quenching. This literally looks like one of those cursed emojis
spot the difference