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September 2018 a Reddit user called divest
Trump uploaded a detailed report to
Reddit about suspicious political posts
that targeted read its main pro Trump
discussion forum the content chiefly
originated from two websites
brutalist. press and USA really calm which have
both been linked to Russia's Internet
research agency and individuals under
investigation by Robert Mueller FBI probe
but it turns out that's just the tip of
the iceberg because tens of millions of
additional reddit users could have been
influenced in a joint investigation
Point in Engadget have learned that at
least three additional domains altright.com veteranstoday.com and Southfront.org are also targeting the Donald and
other conservative subreddits in similar
ways I've actually continued to kind of
hunt down Russian propaganda and others
state-sponsored propaganda there's just
so much all across Reddit I'm still
compiling it but it's it's in the tens
of thousands of posts thousands of users
are spreading it and it's a it's
incredibly pervasive the suspected
Russian propaganda sites have been
targeting at least 89 subreddits in
partnership with data analytics company
Gravwell we have scrutinized the nature
and scale of these posts our findings
suggest a Russian net attempt to
antagonize and influence Americans
online which began mid-september last
year and is still ongoing
the total subscriber base of all 89
subreddit is an excess of 68 million
registered users the majority of the
subreddits were conservative or write
lenient
such as conservatives only the Donald or
dreamless one but some of the largest
subreddits with post from these domains
are also nonpartisan or left-leaning
such as world news atheism or communism
at the time of publishing read it had
banned six of the eighty-nine subreddit
although two of those were banned
because they didn't have any moderators
and not because they were deemed to have
violated the rules of engagement
additionally read it has quarantined one
of these subreddit 9/11 truth which now
comes with a misinformation warning
before users can access the content the
LinkedIn page of USA recon lists its
location as Moscow and the social media
manager as Moscow face Dimitri Kukushkin
another Russian Alexander Malkovich
created the website and works for Yevgeny Prigozhin who has been indicted for
interfering in u.s. elections the FBI
indictment says that Pro goes in
bankrolled Russia's internet research
agency which has been accused of being a
troll Factory the other website that
divest Trump exposed last month
brutalist.press also have easy breadcrumbs
to follow there's a few different sites
online where you can view basic
information about a website where was it
registered was it registered in Russia
is it hosted in Russia and the tricky
part is you know a lot of the Russian
propaganda sites they've they've been
getting smarter and they're using the
dot-com top-level domain name and
they're registering through GoDaddy or
wherever Namecheap so it all looks
American sometimes they don't even try
to cover their tracks which was the case
in USA really they were registered they
were hosted all out of Moscow st.
Petersburg wherever in June 2017 a job
listing was posted to a Russian career
web site with Alex at Bruce Lee stop
press as a contact email address the
advertised position was a front-end
developer with English skills who could
work from home the occasional work trip
to st. Petersburg the website has since
changed its host country to the United
States but a screenshot from a previous
who is page shows that USA really calm
was originally registered in Russia
after posting the mail viral threats
already exposing the efforts of us a
really calm and ruthless top press
divest from toll pointing gadget that
South front org all right calm and
veteran today calm were behaving in very
similar ways on reddit South front was
previously flagged as suspicious by
jessyca arro a researcher and the
Winfred Martin Center for European
studies in Brussels in an academic paper
published in the journal European view
she cited South front org as a
pro-kremlin domain and said that it
portrays herself as a crowdsource
project but it looks more like a
professional info wall projects run or
backs by the Russian military it's
difficult to prove beyond doubt that
website is part of a misinformation
campaign directed from the Kremlin the
researchers of show they only takes a
small band of devotees to influence the
balance of an online conversation Shree
Jiang Kumar a postdoctoral researcher at
Stanford University scrubbed read his
comments and carried out a data-driven
analysis of conflicts on ready he found
that a few bad eggs can have a huge
impact we wanted to understand the
mechanisms that essentially lead to this
phenomena and which users and which
communities are involved at this
troll-like
reading behavior on reddit essentially
what we found was less than 1% of these
communities were responsible for 75% of
these antisocial behaviors of conflict
I've been Gemma Gregor this has been a
joint point and Engadget investigation
thanks for watching and we'll see you
next time
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