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Incident I00032: Kavanaugh

  • Summary: Before the Senate SCOTUS confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, professor Christine Blasey Ford--first anonymously, then publicly--accused Kavanaugh of inappropriate or criminal sexual behavior. Amplified by Russian trolls Right wing operatives first tried to doxx Ford, then to discredit her. Many observers suggest that the Kavanaugh hearings were the largest anti-US Russian online operation for months.

  • incident type: incident

  • Year started: 2018

  • Countries: Russia , USA

  • Found via: OII

  • Date added: 2019-02-24

Technique Description given for this incident
T0007 Create fake Social Media Profiles / Pages / Groups IT00000092 Fake FB groups/pages/profiles
T0010 Cultivate ignorant agents IT00000104 cultivate, manipulate, exploit useful idiots (Alex Jones... drives conspiracy theories)
T0019 Generate information pollution IT00000094 RT & Sputnik generate information pollution
T0020 Trial content IT00000102 4Chan/8Chan - trial content
T0031 YouTube IT00000096 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0032 Reddit IT00000097 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0033 Instagram IT00000098 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0034 LinkedIn IT00000099 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0035 Pinterest IT00000100 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0036 WhatsApp IT00000101 YouTube; Reddit; (Instagram, LinkedIn; Pinterest; WhatsApp?)
T0046 Search Engine Optimization IT00000103 SEO optimisation/manipulation ("key words")
T0053 Twitter trolls amplify and manipulate IT00000091 Twitter trolls amplify & manipulate
T0054 Twitter bots amplify IT00000090 Twitter bots amplify & manipulate
T0056 Dedicated channels disseminate information pollution IT00000095 RT & Sputnik generate information pollution
T0057 Organise remote rallies and events IT00000093 Digital to physical "organize+promote" rallies & events?

DO NOT EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE - PLEASE ADD NOTES BELOW

Summary:

Actors:

  • IRA; other Russian state actors;
  • Roger Stone, Alex Jones, gamergaters

Timeframe: Fall 2018

Date: September-October 2018

Presumed goals:

  • Divide the American public on gender and party lines; Harass and intimidate anti-Trump voices;
  • Promote epistemic confusion;
  • Seed the narrative terrain for future operations;
  • Promote “both sides” relativism;

Method:

  • Amplify extreme and hyper-partisan rhetoric;
  • Promote divisive conspiracy theories;
  • Re-up debunked theories in new contexts (e.g. hashtags);
  • Re-center debates on emotional, rather than rational, content;
  • Alter “ground-truth” resources, such as Wikipedia

Counters: None / Media exposure

Related incidents:

  • gamergate;
  • 2016 election

References

Details

Last month, the attorney of Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a long-ago high school party, revealed that Blasey Ford and her family were in hiding and had hired private security after Blasey Ford received death threats over email and social media. Among those cheering on the hate-trollers were many familiar faces from the sewers of the modern far-right disinformation metropolis: dandified Republican rogue (and likely Mueller investigee) Roger Stone, his alt-media protégés Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, anarchist turned Kremlin propaganda employee turned Bernie backer turned Trump backer Cassandra Fairbanks, and breathless Infowars conspiracist-in-chief Alex Jones. And not surprisingly, alt-right super-troll Chuck Johnson had his own connection to players in the scandal.

This is an operational unit of information terrorists helping to transform the way Americans consume news in the age of Trump—some of the central nodes that give order to the information deluge and around which bot armies and human amplification networks can be organized, wiped out, reconstituted, and armed for attack.

The attacks on Blasey Ford aimed to discredit and silence her using the same tactics that have been deployed to discredit and silence others over the past few years. As others have come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of wrongdoing—including Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick—they have been similarly harassed and smeared by the same machinery and themes.

Online Twitter accounts tied to Russia are heavily involved in discussing the Supreme Court nominee and allegations against him online. Hamilton68, a project run by the German Marshall Fund think tank that tracks tweets “tied to Russia-linked influence networks,” listed Kavanaugh, Trump, the FBI, and Ford as the top four topics mentioned by Russia-linked accounts on the evening of Oct.1.

The Russia-linked accounts are largely lending their support to Kavanaugh, says Jonathon Morgan, CEO of New Knowledge, the company that built the software behind Hamilton68. Morgan, who is currently tracking a set of around 1,000 accounts he believes are tied to Russia, says the Kavanaugh hearings have unleashed more US domestic-focused propaganda from foreign-linked networks than his firm has seen in months.

Posts about Ford and Kavanaugh are “really cluttered and confused,” with various pieces of clear fabrication from both sides, says Decker.

The effort to introduce a doppelganger aligned with another key method used in LikeWars around the world: muddying the debate by throwing out alternative theories. Russia has long been the master of this disinformation tactic. After its 2014 shootdown of the MH-17 airliner over Ukraine, for instance, Russia spread over a dozen different theories of what had really happened. Many were contradictory and debunked previous claims. But the goal wasn’t to find the truth—it was to obscure it behind a smokescreen of lies.

Similarly, the Kavanaugh debate has given rise to false claims and ridiculous photoshopped images, often spread under fake identities. There have been debunked rumors that Kavanaugh had ruled against Ford’s parents in a house foreclosure and that Ford’s brother was part of the Russia investigation. There was even a flurry of unsubstantiated sexual assault charges leveled against Kavanaugh in the hours before the hearing. His supporters were outraged; those opposed to Kavanaugh's nomination speculated that they were placed so that his defenders could point to the media’s unreliability and cast doubt on Ford's credibility.

The state-funded outlet RT, which was recently obligated to register its U.S. branch under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, trumpeted the news that the White House had found no proof of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh after reviewing the findings of a time-limited FBI investigation into the allegations.

The same outlet also called attention to the arrest of several high-profile celebrities, actress and comedian Amy Schumer and model Emily Ratajkowski, who were protesting Kavanaugh’s potential appointment in front of the Supreme Court on Thursday. “Obstruction of Justice?” the outlet asked.

Pro-Kavanaugh accounts have pushed out false smears aimed at discrediting Ford. One notable anti-Kavanaugh post picked up more than 11,000 retweets while purporting to to cite a Wall Street Journal article that in fact didn’t exist.

Other accounts are using popular interest in the Ford-Kavanaugh dispute to push unrelated disinformation. A common tactic is to re-up a conspiracy theory or previously debunked story and add tags related to Kavanaugh so the tweet gains more traction.

Examples include re-circulating debunked sexual assault allegations against Democrats like representative Keith Ellison, senator Cory Booker, and former vice president Joe Biden; or against Republicans like senator Lindsey Graham. “Both sides are coopting matters that may have been killed off and never gained traction, and using the Kavanaugh incident to rehash these different claims,” Decker said.

Morgan says the Russian bots he’s tracking are largely using this latter method, seemingly with the broad aim of making Kavanaugh seem no worse than Democrats. The approach differs from Russian activity during the 2016 election, where influence campaigns aimed to sow discontent among both liberals and conservatives by pushing propaganda that appealed to both sides.

This has all taken on a new heady energy as pushback to #MeToo—and riding the coattails of the conspiracy bandwagon. But the intent is the same: to demonize the opponent, define identity, activate the base around emotional rather than rational concepts, and build a narrative that can be used to normalize marginal and radical political views. It is, after all, very convenient to have a narrative positing that all your political opponents are part of a secret cabal of sexual predators, which thus exonerates your side by default.

Daily Wire’s top story about Kavanaugh confirmation was published Oct. 1 with the headline “Prosecutor Who Questioned Ford Shreds Her Case In Five-Page Memo.” It’s generated more than 205,000 engagements. The site also received just under 180,000 engagements for the story, “Bill Clinton Rape Accuser Juanita Broaddrick Crashes Kavanaugh Hearing, Slams Dems For ‘Biggest Double Standard.’”

Occupy Democrats’ top story about Kavanaugh-Ford is headlined “Matt Damon just DESTROYED Kavanaugh and Senate Republicans in hilarious SNL cold open.” It had just under 70,000 engagements. Another story about the Kavanaugh confirmation, “Bernie Sanders just demanded the FBI investigate five lies Kavanaugh told at his hearing,” generated over 44,000 engagements.

This is the ideological landscape that has been so swiftly leveraged in the defense of Brett Kavanaugh.

The cadre and their followers knew exactly what to do when the allegations made against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford became public. They did not disappoint. Rapid efforts by far-right blogs and personalities to dox and troll Blasey Ford resulted in the targeting of the wrong Christine Blasey Ford; Posobiec was one of those reportedly amping this misguided doxxing. Cernovich said Blasey Ford was a "far left wing activist" who had been "scrubbing" her social media profile, so her accusations were "activism." Alex Jones made a joke of the whole thing, with Infowars saying Blasey Ford is a "leftist" whose accusations were a "political ploy." Fairbanks: "She can't prove it… Her clothes were on… Fuck that lady." That's a particularly strong comment from a one-time anti-rape activist. Stone: "This is a woman looking for her Anita Hill moment."

This is the information that flowed through the architecture the Stone cadre popularized and mainstreamed over the past few years, moving it from the fringe to a central pillar of the conservative agenda, cartoonifying legitimate issues of conservative concern and recruiting new supporters as they went. The narrative was set long ago—allegations are false, men (especially white men) are oppressed, the people who stand against you are corrupt perverts worthy of demonization, and everything that is the America you know will fall apart if you don't fight for some notion of the way things were and should be again. And the best way to achieve this, since the system will fight back, is viciousness.

This architecture is established, and permanently in transmit mode.

Consider the now-infamous and disavowed (but archived here) Ed Whelan twitter thread, an odd diversionary narrative hyped as an alternate theory of the night Blasey Ford describes. Its gist: mistaken identity of the perpetrator. Potential defamation issues aside, it seemed to build on the groundwork being laid by Senate Republicans and the White House to carefully insinuate that Blasey Ford wasn't lying, merely mistaken about who attacked her. But Whelan transformed it into a bonkers Twitterverse conspiracy theory about the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

An analysis of the accounts that retweeted Whelan's teaser for his conspiracy most frequently post content from right and far-right media, several of which are anchors in the far-right disinformation ecosphere (and Russian disinformation, to boot).

Posted for less than 24 hours, Whelan's mistaken-identity theory sparked a wave of blog posts and discussions on far-right sites that live on even after Whelan backed off. This post, for example, repeats Whelan's claims and suggests they all but vindicate Kavanaugh. It was a top-trending piece on disinformation trackers and was still being circulated on Twitter days after the source was deleted. And so was this one, this one, and this one. Some 1.5 million "Fox and Friends" viewers heard all about the mistaken-identity theory live on TV. Once it's out there, you can't pull it back.

The narratives to defend Kavanaugh were mostly about discrediting Blasey Ford: that she was part of a secret CIA mind-control project (the CIA connection was also alluded to by Kremlin disinformation purveyors); that George Soros was behind her allegations; that her lawyer was linked to Hillary Clinton; that she was motivated by profit; that she did this as revenge for a foreclosure case where Kavanaugh's mother, also a judge, ruled against Blasey Ford's parents (only, she didn't—she ruled in their favor); that she had also made false allegations against Neil Gorsuch; and many more.

In the course of his angry self-defense, Kavanaugh stamped a lot of bingo squares: attempted rape allegations as a political tool, false allegations, Clinton, secret conspiracies. By going out and taking the big swing, he elicited a powerful emotional response in his defense—an activated response from a hardened base. #ConfirmKavanaugh was trending—with support of far-right and Russian-linked accounts—after the hearing.

Not even history itself is safe—at least the online version of it, which we increasingly depend on. When Kavanaugh testified that Devil's Triangle, as mentioned on his high school yearbook page, was a drinking game, there was no online evidence to back up his claim. (Other sources asserted it was a known sexual term.) So an anonymous person immediately updated Wikipedia to support Kavanaugh's definition. It was a near perfect parallel to how Russian operatives repeatedly edited the Wikipedia entry for “MH17” in the hours after the airliner was shot down to try to provide an alternative history.

Examples