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

[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...