Publisher’s Note: While Deep State elements, the CIA, and corporate conservative Democrats continue to flog the “Russia Hacked The 2016 Election In Favor Of Trump” meme, and mainstream Dems attempt to link the “Bernie Bros” meme to Russian cyberhackers, Medium gives us a much more nuanced look at how bots, sock puppets and other online propaganda efforts really work behind the scenes. What’s most troubling from our perspective? The developing relationship between US secession efforts like #Calexit and European “influencers” – Nigel Farage and his ilk. The 2VR will remain an indigenous conversation – this is a dialogue between us in the Green Mountains and US.

It’s a brave new cyber-world out there, friends – our best form of defense is decentralized F2F conversation and community resilience. Free Vermont, and long live the UNtied States! Here’s an excerpt from MEDIUM writer Jonathan Morgan’s “Sockpuppets, Secessionists, and Breitbart: How Russia May Have Orchestrated a Massive Social Influence Campaign” article. Notice the term “MAY.” And oh, by the way, the US Deep State has organized “massive social influence campaigns” to influence “grassroots” social and political movements and election outcomes for decades. 

Sockpuppets (from MEDIUM)

…However, while bots were a significant component of the influence operation, and garnered most of the media attention during the campaign, the sudden shift in language during the spring was initiated by fewer than 400 human-operated sockpuppet accounts on Twitter and Facebook, along with 800 commenters on Breitbart news articles. In each community, members of this small group of sockpuppet accounts were the first to introduce new, novel language to the group.

Sockpuppet language was significantly more aggressive in its support for Trump than language from other users in the same community. For example, sockpuppet accounts were six times as likely to compare Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler by referring to her as “Hitlery,” and twice as likely to describe Clinton as a “criminal” or bring up her now infamous “emails.” Also, while typical users made liberal use the exclamation mark, averaging almost one per message, sockpuppets were even more enthusiastic, using exclamation points at more than double the rate of normal accounts. For example, messages like “Donald Trump For President!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (14 exclamation points!) were not uncommon.