Russia Reportedly Used Pokemon Go In an Effort To Inflame Racial Tensions (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Russia's far-ranging campaign to promote dissension in the United States reportedly included an effort to weaponize Pokemon Go. CNN reported that in July 2016, a Tumblr page linked to Russia's now-notorious Internet Research Agency promoted a contest encouraging people sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement to play the game near famous sites of police brutality. Players were told to change their characters' names to the victims of those incidents -- an apparent effort to inflame racial tensions. The Tumblr page was linked to Do Not Shoot Us, a multi-platform campaign designed to mimic aspects of Black Lives Matter. (As CNN notes, the name plays on "hands up, don't shoot," one of the movement's slogans.) Do Not Shoot Us included a website, donotshoot.us, along with related pages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. The Facebook page was one of 470 pages that were removed after the company determined that it was linked to Russian groups attempting to interfere in US politics.

Comments

Re:anyone still believe this Peak Bullshit?

[AmiMoJo]

Actually the evidence is mounting. This article has a good summary with plenty of links: https://www.theguardian.com/us...

I find this report by the Director of National Intelligence particularly interesting: https://www.dni.gov/files/docu...

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trumpâ(TM)s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment;NSA has moderate confidence.

Moscowâ(TM)s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operationsâ"such as cyber activityâ"with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid socialmedia users or âoetrolls.â

The extent to which Trump was involved in this has yet to be determined. The investigation is on-going. It seems that some of his staff did meet with people working for the Russian government and communicated with them in other ways, but to be fair that in itself isn't proof of actual collusion. Trump and his team may well be victims of Russian government manipulation too. It certainly undermines his victory.

We don't know the full extent of this for some time, and even then the way Trump has interfered with the investigation means that any conclusions are unlikely to be accepted now.