“Americans hoping to connect with other Americans on social media after the deadly school shooting in Florida may find themselves mired in a surge of content from Kremlin-linked accounts,” nbc.com reports. Guess which side of the gin control “conversation” the Russians are promoting . . .
According to live data collected by the nonpartisan Hamilton 68 dashboard, Russian-linked Twitter accounts flooded the service with tweets using popular hashtags like #parkland, #guncontrolnow and #florida.
“It’s information war out there and social media increasingly becomes a battlefield of political adversaries ambiguously foreign and domestic,” David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School, said in an email.
By clicking or searching for a hashtag, the firehose of tweets can be organized into smaller topic categories. Users can add a hashtag to participate in a smaller conversation on that subject.
Russian trolls use popular hashtags to get into trending conversations, but then add more incendiary hashtags to drive readers to more partisan conversations and explosive imagery.
And there you have it [comrade]: the Russians, the mainstream media and Democrats all agitating for civilian disarmament. [h/t Mr3D]