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:The strategy is obvious

[sittingnut]

fake russia-gate narrative is reaching absurdist proportions; it seems russians are to be blamed, not only for establishment/deep state backed clinton losing to trump, lack of american success in all the new wars, and incompetence of "intelligence agencies, but also for inane games, racism, "divisiveness", superficial bubble lives, obamacare, illegal immigration, fracking, "global warming", etc etc .
at this rate, soon russians will be blamed for slavery and civil war, colonialism, native american genocide, etc, etc, too; americans could not be held responsible for any of that, we are the good guys!

when did amercans become so ready to run from responsibility for their own actions. they sometimes did "bad" things, and failed, in old days too, but they were not in the habit of blaming their evils on others. they would stand by their actions and even proudly justified them. regardless of morality, that was a great thing, even heroic.

if you renounce responsibility for your own actions and failures, you are voluntarily becoming slaves.

Re:The strategy is obvious

[king neckbeard]

So, Russia wants us to not shoot unarmed black men? Sounds better than our current government, and the past administration. Perhaps the Russians are the "useful idiots," provoking reasonable discussions to make us a little less ass backwards.

Re:The strategy is obvious

[AmiMoJo]

establishment authorities are making claims there is evidence and links, but no concrete details that can be checked independently.

Can you explain this conspiracy where the FBI, CIA, NSA and DNI are deliberately lying about this, going against their government? And how come Trump and the rest of the GOP are unable to do anything about it, even after firing one FBI director?

Look, I don't like those guys either, but you are alleging a vast conspiracy that is trying to topple the US government, but which the government can do little about, and your only "evidence" is that they didn't publish enough details of their investigations to satisfy you.

The DNI report does actually contain a lot of detail. There is independent evidence, like accounts that claim to be westerners but only post during Moscow office hours, or op-sec failures like "Antifa Boston" forgetting to disable geotagging (Moscow again).

Extraordinary claims...