At this point, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that Russian hackers and paid trolls had a significant impact on the 2016 presidential election. The biggest story, however, is that those same hackers and trolls continue to undermine our country by sowing discord and causing chaos. A popular Twitter Antifa account was recently outed as a fake Russian mouthpiece, created to give the group a bad name.
Antifa is a loosely organized group created to oppose the “alt-right,” also known as neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The name “Antifa” is actually shorthand: the full name is “Anti-fascists.” Apparently the alt-right needed to shorten it because it can be difficult to say you are against “anti-fascism.”
The Twitter account in question was called “Boston Antifa,” and regularly posted derogatory memes and calls to dubiously legal action against alt-right groups. It was routinely held up as a demonstration that far left extremists were just as bad as far right ones. The account, which has since been suspended, accidentally outed itself as a part of the Russian propaganda machine when they posted this message about the NFL, which many Twitter users captured before it was taken down:
Boston Antifa, a fake antifa Twitter account, forgot to turn off location sharing. Posted from Vladivostok, Russia (via @Reddit). pic.twitter.com/1U60igqxwi
— Rob Tornoe (@RobTornoe) September 27, 2017
You can see the highlighted text right after the time and date the tweet was posted: “from Vladivostok, Russia.”
Even Twitter trolls sometimes get careless with their location settings.
Our President, Donald Trump, has gotten into hot water a few times for equating protesters from Antifa with members of the alt-right. After neo-Nazis and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville and ran into protesters, Trump infamously claimed there were good and bad people on both sides, and everyone was equally at fault for the violence that occurred.
A protester against the alt-right named Heather Heyer was murdered during that altercation, after an angry alt-right demonstrator intentionally drove his car into a crowd of protesters.
Watch Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville violence below:
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons user Mohammed Abushaban / CC BY-SA 3.0.
