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Sorry for thequestion, but what is the purpose of bots in a forum like this?
Black or bot? The long, sordid history of co-opting Blackness online
Trolls and foreign agents love to exploit African-American culture for political gain.
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Black or Bot? The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online
Trolls and foreign agents love to exploit African-American culture for political gain.
MORGAN JERKINSSEPTEMBER+OCTOBER 2022 ISSUEFight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
In late February, just after Russia invaded Ukraine, my Twitter feed began filling up with videos showing Black exchange students being refused passage on trains fleeing the escalating conflict, while white students had no problem boarding. But not everyone was buying it. In a now-deleted tweet, Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma shared a Washington Post article reporting on the spread of disinformation, and added, “as videos go viral, a reminder about verifying sources before sharing—and a reminder that Russia disinfo ops have specifically targeted Black people in the past with fake accounts and media.”
“The videos and the ppl are real,” Q. Anthony Omene, creator of RZNWA Media, who had been amplifying the voices of those speaking out about anti-Black racism in Ukraine, shot back in response. Omene and others raising concerns were not part of a disinformation campaign, he asserted, but rather real people who had been in contact with African students who were struggling to escape. “People were accusing me of being a Russian bot,” he tells me, wondering whether his internationalist politics and identity as a communist played a role in why both white and Black users distrusted him. “I still get called to this day a Russian disinformation agent.”
“I still get called to this day a Russian disinformation agent.”
When Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on Black identity in the Soviet Union, delved into the conversation, she too came under fierce attacks. Media outlets were asking her for the provenance of one of the videos, so St. Julian-Varnon posed the question on Twitter: “do we have a source for this video?” The question triggered something she wasn’t quite expecting: “People came after me,” she recalls. “People were like, ‘You’re being racist,’ ‘You’re white,’ ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.'”
The bigotry that African students faced at the border was in fact real. But Sharma and St. Julian-Varnon’s suspicions weren’t unfounded: Bots, particularly those from Russia, have been known to pose as Black people on Twitter. Online, the existential question of who someone truly is becomes fertile ground for chaos agents to further ignite painful interracial tensions. This discord serves to perpetuate racism, which has always been founded on lies. As feminist researcher and blogger Sydette Harry says, “Racism is disinformation. Racism has been a form of this since almost every single iteration of mass communications, especially public [ones].”
This manipulation of Blackness for political gain was on full display during the 2016 election. According to a 2018 New York Times report, Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), which fueled the country’s influence campaign and was owned by a close Putin ally, “created a dozen websites disguised as African American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us.” A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russia’s interference found that, on Facebook, more than 66 percent of the ira’s advertising content contained the word “race”; five of its top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African Americans and issues pervading Black communities; its Twitter page was full of stories about race and racism, such as the NFL kneeling protests; and 96 percent of its YouTube content was devoted to “racial issues and police brutality.”
Yet the 2016 election wasn’t the first time Russians had targeted African Americans. This particular subset of the culture war has been brewing for years, tracing back to the knotted web of political agendas on both sides of the hemisphere.
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