Four years after Russian operatives used social media in a bid to exacerbate racial divisions in the United States and suppress Black voter turnout, such tactics have spread across a wide range of deceptive online campaigns operated from numerous nations — including from within the United States itself.
The potency and persistence of the racial playbook was highlighted this week when Twitter deleted an account featuring a profile photo of a young Black man claiming to be a former Black Lives Matter protester who switched his allegiance to the Republican Party.
The account, @WentDemtoRep, offered an online testimonial Sunday — the eve of a Republican convention featuring prominent African Americans challenging allegations of racism against President Trump — and was retweeted 22,000 times. Disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, of Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, found the tweet had 39,000 likes just 19 hours after it was posted.
Twitter removed the account Tuesday for policy violations after it had amassed 15,000 followers despite tweeting just a few times, all this month. The rapid spread of the tweet underscored how easily deceptive messages spread online — and how far they can get before social media companies are able to curb them.
“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” the tweet said, according to archived versions showing that the account was created this month, supposedly from Arizona. “I joined the BLM protests months ago when they began. They opened my eyes wide! I didn’t realize I became a Marxist. It happened w/o me even knowing it. I’m done with this trash. I’ll be registering Republican.”
Twitter suspended the account and several others that posted similar messages for violating rules about “platform manipulation and spam,” said a company spokesman, Trenton Kennedy. The company provided no other details of who created the account. In dozens of cases, the text from the original message was pasted directly into tweets of other accounts.