How Russian & Alt-Right Twitter Accounts Worked Together to Skew the Narrative About Berkeley

#Antifa and #Berkeley were hot topics last weekend in America — and in Russia

In the case study below, I describe how the narrative surrounding Berkeley was picked up and shaped by Russian-linked influence networks, which saw a chance to drive a wedge in American society and ran with it. Next, I look at the individual accounts and users that were identified as top influencers on Twitter, and explore what they were posting, how they worked together to craft a narrative, and the methods they used to amplify their message. Finally, I look at how news coverage of the events in Berkeley was shaped by the skewed narrative that emerged on social media.

.. Three of the top 10 most frequently shared URLs within the Russian-linked influence network were related to Antifa or the Berkeley protests

.. these trends show that users in the network of Russian-linked influence operations wanted to exploit unrest in the U.S. and “amplify alt-right alarmism about the left-wing Antifa (short for anti-fascist) movement.” For several consecutive days this week, the most-tweeted link in the network was a whitehouse.gov petition seeking to declare Antifa a terrorist group.

.. Once it started trending, the ‘alt-right’ made a concerted effort to flood the hashtag #Berkeley with negative posts about #Antifa in an attempt to saturate the hashtag, as well as to mix in some misinformation and disinformation to muddy the waters. The purpose was to create and then establish control of the narrative, skew perceptions of the event and those involved in it, and influence mainstream media coverage by boosting the visibility of certain content.

.. the hashtag #Antifa looked quite different. Nearly all of the top influencers were ‘alt-right’/far-right Trump supporters, including

  • Mike Cernovich,
  • Paul Joseph Watson,
  • Irma Hinojosa,
  • Mike Tokes,
  • Nick Short,
  • Bill Mitchell, and
  • Dinesh DSouza.

.. Only two of the top 30 influencers were not part of this ‘alt-right’/far-right group

.. Notably, a fake Julian Assange account was the most influential contributor to the #Antifa hashtag (as measured by engagement), and both Roger Stone (bottom row, far left) and Nigel Farage were also among the top influencers (bottom row, last on the right).

.. A final noteworthy observation: The third most influential contributor to the #Antifa hashtag was one of the many fake Antifa accounts (BevHillsAntifa) created in the spring and summer of 2017.

.. Antifa is not an organization

..  Other dominant themes included a concerted effort to connect Antifa to the Democratic party and to smear the name of Black Lives Matter, as well as to shift the focus from the surge of right-wing extremist violence to the individual actions of “leftist” protesters.

.. you can see the narrative surrounding #Antifa really start to take shape. The dominant themes all involved presenting an exaggerated threat and promoting right-wing alarmism about that threat. These themes included labeling Antifa as a terrorist organization, trying to link Antifa to George Soros, presenting Antifa as the aggressor and far-right extremists as the victims, and trying to portray Antifa as the “real” fascists. Both-siderism was also a common tactic used, often in attempt to equate hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan with Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

..Repetition is one of the most important elements of successful propaganda dissemination. Even when information is not true, being exposed to it repeatedly and from multiple sources boosts its credibility and increases the likelihood that an audience will internalize and believe the message. Repetition also increases the likelihood that any given person will be exposed to the message, while simultaneously drowning out alternative messages and perspectives.

.. When people see that other individuals with similar ideological viewpoints are propagating a certain message or position, they’re more likely to adopt that perspective themselves. Additionally, perceptions of widespread support can make extreme ideas seem more acceptable and “mainstream” —a key step in the process of normalization. These social normative factors make social media ripe for manipulation, as it’s easy to create false impressions of support using automated accounts (“bots”), cyborgs, and orchestrated hashtag campaigns.

..The methods used by these “alt-right”/far-right figures to shape the narrative surrounding #Antifa and #Berkeley may look familiar, as they mirror the methods used by authoritarian states to manipulate public opinion and skew perceptions of reality

..The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive. Quantity does indeed have a quality all its own. High volume can deliver other benefits that are relevant in the Russian propaganda context.

  1. First, high volume can consume the attention and other available bandwidth of potential audiences, drowning out competing messages.
  2. Second, high volume can overwhelm competing messages in a flood of disagreement.
  3. Third, multiple channels increase the chances that target audiences are exposed to the message.
  4. Fourth, receiving a message via multiple modes and from multiple sources increases the message’s perceived credibility, especially if a disseminating source is one with which an audience member identifies.
.. By focusing on the isolated fights and outbursts by individual actors, a handful of Twitter accounts (amplified by bots & cyberborgs) shifted the focus away from the widespread, ongoing, and orchestrated activities of groups like the

Proud Boys and their “military division” known as the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK), as well as provocateurs and instigators like

.. For months, these “alt-right” and far-right extremists have been traveling to liberal cities and showing up at rallies wearing helmets, goggles, and body armor, and often carrying shields, flagpoles, and weighted sticks. While they’ve gotten (somewhat) more discreet in recent months, their plans for violence — including directions for making weapons to get past security, instructions for making improvised explosive devices, and discussions about the best gear for battle — are often made out in the open, reflecting just how emboldened these groups have become.

.. They carry this out under the guise of buzzwords like “free speech” or “patriotism”, but their intent is clear: They want to provoke violence.

.. They use these so-called “free speech” rallies as recruitment events to increase their membership, and they know violence sells. They also know that increasing their size and consolidating power requires more mainstream support, and a quick way to get that support is by portraying themselves as brave martyrs fighting against a supposed uprising of “violent leftists” — represented by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and anyone else they can fool the media into demonizing.

.. By traveling to liberal cities where they know they’ll encounter resistance, they can then frame their violence as a defense against “intolerant leftists” trying to “shut down free speech.” This, in turn, gives mainstream conservatives and right-wing figures a reason (or, in some cases, an excuse) to support their cause.

.. Violence sells. Mainstream news outlets know this, too, which is why they often prioritize sensationalism over context. As Shane Bauer warned in his account of the events in Berkeley, “reporters shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture: Fascists and other far-right extremist groups in America are visible and organized in a way that they haven’t been in decades.” Only this time, they’re harnessing the power of social media to increase their visibility — and Russia is helping them do it.

‘Alt-Right’ Leaders Won’t Condemn Ramming Suspect

Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo, two leading figures of the white nationalist alt-right movement who had participated in Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally , spoke to reporters at Spencer’s office and apartment in Alexandria.

.. Spencer blamed the authorities for what happened in Charlottesville, saying the city’s mayor and governor of Virginia have “blood on their hands” for not policing the situation properly. The alt-right, he said, is “nonviolent;” he waxed nostalgic while speaking about the hundreds of white nationalists marching through Charlottesville with torches on Friday night, calling the event “really beautiful.”

Some fighting between them and counter-protesters reportedly took place during the Friday event;

Saturday’s rally attracted militia members with guns, and descended into all-out street violence.

.. But one person who didn’t come in for unequivocal criticism was Charlottesville suspect James Alex Fields, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who had come to protest the Unite the Right event. Fields was photographed earlier in the day at the rally with Vanguard America, a self-identified white supremacist and fascist group that attended the rally.

.. General Jeff Sessions has called the incident an act of terrorism.

.. “I am not going to condemn this young man at this point,” Spencer said. When he first saw the video, he said, he saw it as a “malicious act of violence”; but he’s now less sure that it was a purposeful act and won’t come down on one side or another until an investigation is complete.

.. Spencer dismissed Trump’s statement as “kumbaya nonsense” and said he didn’t view it as a repudiation of his movement, which he defended as “non-violent.”

“He sounded like a Sunday school teacher,” he said. “I just don’t take it seriously.”

.. “I don’t know exactly what he meant by that statement,” Damigo said. “People in his position, they’re not stupid, they make these very ambiguous statements with words that are very loaded and hard to interpret.”

.. we don’t know the facts yet.

.. “We were connected with Donald Trump on a kind of psychic level,” he said of the alt-right. Trump is the “first true authentic nationalist in my lifetime.”

.. Asked who in the White House he views as a fellow traveler of the alt-right, Spencer named top policy advisor Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon

“They at least are connected with identitarian ideas in a way that the rest of them are not,” Spencer said.

.. But he seemed less than cowed, promising to return to Charlottesville.

“There’s no way in hell I’m not going back to Charlottesville,” he said.

Dinesh D’Souza on ‘The Big Lie’: ‘Fascism Has Crept Deeply into the Bowels of the Left’

“There’s a deep fascist streak in politics now. Ironically, the fascism of today marches under the banner of anti-fascism, and it claims the moral credibility of anti-fascism,” D’Souza said. “In other words, it tries to take all the odor of fascism – stained as it is with the Holocaust, Auschwitz – and project it onto Trump and on the right.”

“This is a massive historical deception. That’s the Big Lie at its core,”

.. D’Souza saw the election of former President Barack Obama as the tipping point for left-wing fascism.

.. “When Obama came in with his sort of Alinskyite sensibility, and Hillary, of course, having the same, a kind of gangsterism came into American politics.” he continued, “a gangsterism that said things like, ‘Let’s deploy the IRS against our opposition. Let’s wiretap using the FBI. Let’s try to put our opponents in prison.’ This is sort of fascist behavior, and this is the kind of thing that I don’t think – I mean, Jimmy Carter would not have dreamed of it. Neither would JFK or Truman.”

.. D’Souza said the left was driven to embrace these tactics by “the glimpse of being able to establish exactly what the fascists always wanted: a complete centralized state.”

.. “Remember, for example, that with the NSA today there are surveillance technologies that were completely unavailable to Mussolini in the 20s or Hitler in the 30s,” he pointed out. “So in a sense, true fascism, full-scale fascism, is more possible today than it was in the twentieth century.”

“This is sort of the leftist objective. Now, they thought that they were almost there – and then, out of nowhere, comes this bizarre guy Trump, and he sort of turns the tables. He takes over, and they’ve suddenly lost all three branches of government, and they can’t believe it. This is the fury out of which they’re striking back,” he said.

.. “Now, I’m not comparing the left to the Nazis of Auschwitz,” he added. “But I am comparing them to the early Nazis, and, in fact, I would insist that the history of the Democratic Party – look at its 150-year history of racism, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan. This history is actually more reminiscent of Nazism than of, say, Mussolini-style fascism.”

.. “Mussolini didn’t actually have concentration camps,” he elaborated. “He didn’t persecute the Jews in the systematic fashion Hitler did. He didn’t have segregation. Mussolini’s fascism, in a sense, was much less racist. So if you want to compare racism, you’ve got to compare the Democratic Party with the Nazis – both those groups imbued, over most of their history, with deep racism.”

.. Kassam proposed that much of this truth has been hidden by rebranding left-wing heroes of the past, such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s transformation from eugenicist to “women’s health” pioneer.

“Margaret Sanger’s basic premise was eugenics,” D’Souza agreed. “More children from the fit and less from the unfit. She was in support of fairly extreme measures, including segregation and then, notoriously, forced sterilization in order to deprive lower-class and uneducated women of the chance to reproduce. She was very explicit about that.”

“Now, when the Nazis did it in 1933, Margaret Sanger gave speeches praising it. She said, ‘Look, the Nazis, the Germans, are ahead of us. We’ve got to catch up to them.’ This is the actual Margaret Sanger, but it’s not the Margaret Sanger you’ll find in Planned Parenthood brochures,” he said.

.. “Number one, I notice that the Republicans very rarely answer the accusations that are made against them,” D’Souza replied. “For example, all Trump needs to say is something like, ‘Hey, guys, it’s very interesting you call me a fascist. First of all, you guys slay me on every existing platform. I turn on the TV, comedians are ridiculing me. The media is blasting me. Hollywood people are railing. If I was really a fascist, do you think I would allow that to happen? Do you think Mussolini would allow the radio in Rome to be blasting him? No, he’d send some people over. They’d shut down the radio station. That would be the end of that.’”

“Real fascism doesn’t tolerate that kind of dissent,” he noted. “The pervasiveness of it is clear proof that Trump is not an authoritarian; he’s not a fascist.”

.. The guys, for example, who wrote the Nuremberg laws, the senior Nazi officials, are literally standing there and debating these laws holding in their hand the blueprints of Democratic laws of the Jim Crow South. And they’re basically saying, ‘All we need to do, in effect, is cross out the word black and write in the word Jew, and we’re home free.’ Literally, the Nuremberg laws were not parallel to, they were based upon – they were directly derived from – Democratic laws formed in America, in the South,” he said.

How Hungary Became a Haven for the Alt-Right

The increasingly illiberal European country offers shelter to a growing number of international nationalists.

.. Orbán’s “refugees” have been moving to Hungary, and Budapest in particular, for years. A small clique of Identitarians, or aggrieved nationalists from Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and elsewhere, all motivated by their disdain for their home countries’ commitment to liberal values, have found an ideological match in his Hungary, where two extreme far-right parties, the governing Fidesz and Jobbik, the largest opposition party, make up most of the National Assembly.

Jobbik is the first European political party to champion a border wall. Its members frequently express open anti-Semitic and anti-Roma sentiments, and prioritize the preservation of “Hungary for the Hungarians.”

.. they have created a structured propaganda circuit, in the hopes of spreading their ideas far and wide.

.. At the center of the scene is a publishing house called Arktos Media. It is routinely referred to as the preeminent publisher of the alt-right

.. Dugin’s “ethnonationalism,” a belief in the creation of ethnically homogenous nation states, has been championed by white nationalists, who argue that Europe and America are innately white nations.

.. Arktos titles largely promote a viewpoint it characterizes as “alternatives to modernity” that are critical of liberalism, human rights, and modern democracy.

 .. he argues that multiculturalism and liberal human rights—what he calls “cultural Marxism”—have been the dominant culture since the fall of Nazism, and outlines how transforming this culture space is necessary for political and social change.
.. In 2014, Jobbik’s popularity surged, thanks to a platform that pledged to preserve Hungarian ethnic purity.
.. These are people with an almost medieval view on the world and they find a safe haven in Hungary,” Kréko told me.
.. multiculturalism is the supreme enemy
.. Both believe in draconian immigration laws based on ethnic and racial preservation.
.. 20th-century intellectual fascist Julius Evola’s A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth
.. Evola, who White House chief strategist Steve Bannon quoted in a 2014 speech at the Vatican, is considered by academics as “possibly the most important intellectual figure for the Radical Right in contemporary Europe.”

.. Marton Gyöngyösi, another key politician in Jobbik credited with calling for all Jews in Hungary to be registered on a list.
.. Jobbik’s resistance to immigration, he said, is limited to people from “Africa or the Middle East,” because they do not share the same “cultural values” as Hungarians, as opposed to the “Austrians or Polish or American people who come to our country and who share the same civilization, the same religion, or the same values or way of life.”
.. Friberg has sought to obscure his violent transgressions under a cover of intellectual legitimacy.
.. He has spent his far-right career repackaging eugenicist ideology by rebranding the same or similar material with words such as “identitarian,” “traditionalist,” or “archeofuturist.”
.. Michael Polignano, co-founder of Counter-Currents, moved to Budapest in 2016, and joined the nationalist scene. After moving to Hungary in January 2017, men’s rights activist Matt Forney wrote:
“Imagine there’s no leftists. It’s easy if you try. No protests in the streets, and in front of us, only cute white girls. That world exists, and it’s called Hungary.”
.. YouTube and Twitter personality RamZPaul, who has lived in the Hungarian capital off and on since 2013, tweeted in February to nearly 35,000 followers: “Budapest is like Paris of the 1920s. #Hungary.”
.. British Nationalist Party leader Nick Griffin .. has been deeply involved with a radical Christian organization called “The Knights Templar International,”
.. a resettlement campaign called “Operation Ark” for “refugee” South African Boers to relocate to rural Hungary
.. Breitbart is now rumored to be opening a Hungarian office in the near future
.. these nationalist internationals are creating a sanctuary from which to broadcast anti-globalism across the globe.