There’s something grimly funny about the Laura Ingraham situation. She’s the Fox News host who taunted school massacre survivor David Hogg concerning his college admissions failures; he then returned fire by listing her show’s commercial sponsors and suggesting his Twitter followers might call them up and discuss that support. Sponsors began dropping, although I haven’t tried to keep track.
So who’s rallying to her beleaguered side? From WaPo:
Embattled Fox News host Laura Ingraham has found some unlikely allies: Russian bots.
As Business Insider reported, Russian-linked Twitter accounts have rallied around the conservative talk-show host, who has come under fire for attacking the young survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.
According to the website Hamilton 68, which tracks the spread of Russian propaganda on Twitter, the hashtag #IstandwithLaura jumped 2,800 percent in 48 hours this weekend. On Saturday night, it was the top trending hashtag among Russian campaigners.
The website botcheck.me, which tracks 1,500 “political propaganda bots,” found that @ingrahamangle, @davidhogg111 and @foxnews were among the top six Twitter handles tweeted by Russia-linked accounts this weekend. “David Hogg” and “Laura Ingraham” were the top two-word phrases being shared.
Wading into controversy is a key strategy for Russian propaganda bots, which seize on divisive issues online to sow discord in the United States. Since the Feb. 14 Parkland shooting, which claimed 17 lives, Russian bots have flooded Twitter with false information about the massacre.
Assuming botcheck and Hamilton 68 are accurate, the rush of Russian bots to the rescue of Ingraham is a rather noir commentary on the status of a voice that would want to be associated with liberty and the right-wing. The Russians have little history with liberty, what with a dubious recent Presidential election and the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in the UK. Further, the fact that foreign ‘bots on Twitter are being used to rally support suggests she’s dependent on foreign support to stay afloat, a suggestion which might be dubious in itself, but is hard to separate from authentic support.
Do authentic American Twitter users who support her know about the Russian support? Are we learning how to recognize efforts to stir up divisiveness, or are we not yet getting it?
Beats me.
