In fact the old Novorossian flag is a lot like a Confederate flag and Southeastern rebels in Ukraine are using it too. Although Ukrainian rebels are Confederates in a sense too.
Posted on 12/17/2019 10:27:20 AM PST by yesthatjallen
American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.
Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.
The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.
“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”
When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Memes are a threat to the globalist world order and therefore must be stopped.
More vilification to destroy the heritage of the South by linking it to Russia. It almost worked for the Democrats so why not Confederate heritage?
If what they are doing is so racist, why won’t you just show me what they are doing and trust me to make up my own mind?
Been more than 15 years old, if it’s someone on the left shrieking “racist” louder and louder without presenting first hand evidence, I know they are lying.
If a meme started at the Kremlin, the Hague, the Ganges, or the third phone booth in the 2nd concourse at ATL... it doesn’t become a meme until the internet turns it into one.
Stop trying to censor the people
They are trying to stop memes around the world with changes to copyright law.
Horse is already out of the barn.
Officially sanctioned speech does not need the First Amendment.
Speech that threatens the established order needs the First Amendment.
In fact the old Novorossian flag is a lot like a Confederate flag and Southeastern rebels in Ukraine are using it too. Although Ukrainian rebels are Confederates in a sense too.
I think I’m gonna cry....
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