How Russian trolls helped disrupt the Women's March against Trump
How Russian trolls helped disrupt the Women's March against Trump: "Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg, and controlled by an ally of Putin, had boasted of propelling Trump to victory. That year, the group's budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by American prosecutors. Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general - the goal of deepening rifts in American society. The job was not to put forward arguments, but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of 'indignation'. The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy. As the Women's March drew nearer, the Russian trolls tested different approaches on different audiences, as they had during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. They posed as resentful trans women, poor women, and anti-abortion women. They dismissed the marchers as pawns of...
