The Russia connectionRussia targeted Sanders supporters, pushing them to vote for Trump
As part of Russia’s broad 2016 effort to ensure Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, Russian hackers targeted supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), following his primary loss in 2016, trying to push them to vote for Donald Trump instead of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Daren Linvill, the Clemson University researcher who conducted the research of the Russian campaign, said the Russians saw Sanders as “just a tool.” “He is a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party,” resulting in lower turnout for Clinton, he said.
Bernie Sanders greets supporters // Source: indepedent.co.uk
As part of Russia’s broad 2016 effort to ensure Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, Russian hackers targeted supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), following his primary loss in 2016, trying to push them to vote for Donald Trump instead of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
These are the findings of a detailed investigative report conducted by Clemson University researchers and published in the Washington Post.
Newsmax reports that shortly after Sanders ended his primary campaign, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News began focusing on the senator’s supporters. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” read one tweet from the account, according to the Post.
Clemson University researchers found that this Twitter account was not based in Louisiana, as it claimed, but in Russia. Special counsel Robert Mueller found in his investigation that operatives for the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, and the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) – a toll farm working for the Kremlin — were directed by the Kremlin to use social media accounts to oppose Clinton and “to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”
The Post notes that “Only recently, with the latest analysis of Twitter data, has the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign been documented on that social media platform.”
Researchers found that although it is impossible to tell for sure how many social media posts were made targeting Sanders supporters, at least 9,000 of these Russian tweets included the word “Bernie,” and those were “liked” 59,281 times and retweeted 61,804 times
This was only one element of the Russian effort to target Sanders supporters, the researchers said. Many thousands of other tweets, with no direct reference to Sanders, were also designed to appeal to his backers, urging them to do anything but vote for Clinton in the general election.
“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton,” said Darren Linvill, an associate professor of communications at Clemson and one of the researchers.
