“These Americans Were Tricked Into Working For Russia. They Say They Had No Idea.” But I think they did it on purpose.
BuzzFeed News spoke to four people who organized black rights protests and taught self-defense classes after being contacted by Russian trolls pretending to be US activists.
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One target was Micah White, a cofounder of Occupy Wall Street... White said that after the story was published on the BlackMatters site a few days later, he didn’t think more about it. But Davis continued to email him for several months and asked him to promote some events.
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[Another target] Conrad James, who runs a nonprofit based in Raleigh, North Carolina called Living Ultra-Violet. James told BuzzFeed News that BlackMattersUS reached out with a message from its Facebook page, rather than from an individual member, asking him to speak at a rally in September 2016 after the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was shot by police in Charlotte.
“I thought it was a knockoff of Black Lives Matter,” James said about the name, but when he looked at their website, “they looked legit.” ... James said he didn’t find out that the group was linked to a Russian troll farm until
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[Another target] Omowale Adewale, ..contacted by what he now knows to be the troll farm to hold courses in New York City... to teach four self-defense classes a month. ...he didn’t realize that the situation was connected to Russia until recent reports began to connect Russian efforts to sway the election through Facebook, Twitter, and — in particular — targeting black organizers.
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