Officers blocked Michigan Avenue at Street with a CTA bus and their bodies on June 4, 2020, as Black Lives Matter protesters marched to the Chicago Police Department headquarters on the south side, which was not an easy justice for George Floyd.
Tyler Pasciak LaRivière/Sun-Times
When the Democratic National Convention takes its place in Chicago in August, protesters are expected to take to the streets to draw attention to a wide range of causes: immigration, as well as police behavior, abortion, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
What they might never know is the extent to which Russia and other countries tried to influence marches and protests near the United Center and McCormick Place conference venues, disinformation experts say.
“The eyes of the world are going to be focused on” the convention, said Max Bergmann, a former State Department official, who says Russia has long tried to “exploit our divisions. “”There will be protests and I think that’s kind of red meat for Russian intelligence. “
Bergmann, program director of the Center for Strategic International Studies, a Washington-based tank, says the conference is ripe for foreign influence campaigns aimed at “sowing chaos” and potentially stoking violence.
Some online influencer efforts are very sophisticated. According to Bergmann and others, they are not only aimed at spreading propaganda and disinformation on social media and through their own fake news sites, who say the Russians are now construction sites almost equal to the Western mainstream media. in an effort to deceive people while spreading their message.
Ahead of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Russian operatives were accused of hacking emails from leaders who showed bias in favor of candidate Hillary Clinton over her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The revelation sent shockwaves weeks before the conference and prompted the resignation of the U. S. president. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, conference president.
U. S. intelligence officials concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin led an operation to bolster the Republican candidacy of Donald Trump, who then defeated Clinton. Allegations that Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russia weighed heavily during his tenure, even though an investigation by a special counsel found there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges.
Russia’s meddling efforts this year are likely to be broader, from social media to stoke dissent over hot-button issues to “human assets” to infiltrate protest groups, Bergmann says.
“This could be the case where Russian agents are physically incorporated into some of those groups,” he says. “And their task is to incite on the ground, to be the ones who throw the first stone to provoke some violence. “
In addition, social media “has become a much bigger cesspool than it was in 2016,” Bergmann says, pointing to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which billionaire owner Elon Musk has proclaimed as a haven for free speech. Bergmann says the platform has “become kind of an area for extremists and anyone who needs to harm America. “
“In a way, the environment is very permissive if you’re an agent of the Russian intelligence services,” he says. “The same goes for Facebook after receiving the highest percentage of scrutiny, I think, after 2016. “
Bergmann says Russians are in a position to tackle issues like undocumented immigration and racial justice, just as activists prepare to protest President Joe Biden over Israel’s war against Hamas and the erosion of abortion rights.
“It’s just a target-rich stew for the Russians to go through a lot of things and see what works and what doesn’t,” Bergmann says. “And they’re going to have a maximum failure rate. But the danger is that they will find a way to incite violence or provoke a real synthetic political scandal. “
For months, activists have been in favor of the Democratic National Convention. At a convention in April for what’s called the “March on the DNC 2024,” an activist, Jesse Nevel, spoke about a federal felon case that accused him and his colleagues of running on behalf of the Russian government to conduct a multi-year-long “foreign campaign” in the United States.
Nevel, Penny Hess, and Omali Yeshitela, all Americans, are charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States, reporting first to the Attorney General.
According to a 2023 indictment, a Russian named Aleksandr Ionov recruited them and others to create division in the United States and publicize secessionist ideologies. Under Russian supervision, Ionov carried out an unsuccessful political crusade in 2019 in St. Petersburg, Florida, according to the indictment. . Ionov told Reuters in Moscow that this is not a disinformation crusade in the United States. “These accusations are absolutely absurd,” he told the press service.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Ionov also raised cash for the legal defense of Maria Butina, a Russian national who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent by registering with the Department of Justice. Butina, deported in 2019 to her home country, has been accused of infiltrating the National Rifle Association to forge ties with conservatives before Trump’s election in 2016.
In 2015, Yeshitela, founder of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru movement, to which Nevel and Hess belong, traveled to Russia and partnered with Ionov, according to the indictment. Ionov is accused of teaching Americans living in Florida. and Missouri, to publish Russian propaganda and disinformation.
According to the government, the propaganda included a 2015 United Nations petition “on the genocide of African peoples in the United States” and a 2016 petition in support of Russian Olympic athletes accused of state doping. The indictment also refers to a 2022 speech in which Yeshitela supported Russia’s “defensive” war against Ukraine.
The indictment claims that Ionov was directly involved in U. S. politics, sending Nevel a message in 2017 providing “campaign financing” for his failed bid for mayor of St. Petersburg, where he advocated reparations for African Americans and said the city was spending too much on police. He won only 1% of the votes cast. In 2019, according to the indictment, Ionov exchanged messages with Russian security and counterintelligence officials about his efforts to elect another anonymous political candidate in St. Petersburg.
In 2022, the FBI raided offices related to the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru movement. Nevel, Hess and Yeshitela, indicted the following year, now call themselves the “Uhuru 3. “
Attorney Leonard Goodman.
Pennsylvania
On Sept. 28, 2023, Chicago attorney Leonard Goodman, who was representing Hess, unsuccessfully suggested sentencing to dismiss the charges against her and the other Uhuru 3 defendants, saying, “It would make a loophole in the First Amendment. “
“This is a nonviolent prosecution of critics of the U. S. government, without any allegation that there is any national security concern, unless they have a relationship with the Russians,” he said, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Nevel’s lawyer, Akbar Thomas, acknowledges that his client spoke at the “March on the DNC” assembly in April about Uhuru 3, but said there was nothing nefarious about it.
“That’s the picture this has been doing since the ’70s in terms of anti-globalism, anti-capitalism, fighting for the rights of blacks and Africans,” Thomas says. “It has nothing to do with Russia or Russian agents. “
It turns out that another American has placed himself in the middle of the data war in Russia. John Mark Dougan, a former Florida sheriff’s deputy who fled to Moscow to escape criminal charges, has been hooked up to a network of more than 160 who publish fake articles. selling Russian propaganda.
The network included a short-lived newspaper called the Chicago Chronicle that published baseless claims that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer oversaw vaccine trials that killed dozens of Ukrainian children, according to a recent report by NewsGuard, which examines online news and information.
The narrative was amplified through pro-Kremlin accounts on X and reported through Russian state television. Between September and this month, social media posts and news articles promoting the network’s false claims were viewed more than 37 million times in 16 languages, according to NewsGuard.
Welton Chang, chief executive of Pyrra Technologies, which tracks disinformation and extremism online for companies, think tanks and universities, says that in 2016, Russians were “betting heavily on other racial divisions” and seeking to draw attention to Hillary Clinton’s failures. Chang says he now finds himself in “potentially violence-generating narratives” in the run-up to this summer’s Democratic convention.
Pyrra uses synthetic intelligence to collect and delete web posts. Most of the messages discussing (and in some cases encouraging) violence and destruction at the Democratic conference come from far-right platforms, as well as disturbing conspiracy theories about the upcoming event.
A recent search of Pyrra’s auto-tracking formula revealed many such posts, adding one on the social network Gab, a hotbed of racism and extremism, that read, “The more craziness and chaos there is at the Democratic National Committee conference in Chicago, the better. “, assaults, I’ll get my popcorn ready to watch it all implode.
Antibot4Navalny, an organization that studies Russian disinformation efforts, says that in recent weeks, pro-Kremlin bots posing as other genuine people in X have been selling items focused on border security and immigration to the United States.
One such article was published through Breitbart News, a far-right media outlet run in the past by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Two other such articles gave the impression on an online page that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, flagged as potentially malicious. According to Meta, this online page is related to Doppelgänger, described through the social media giant as “the biggest and maximum covert competitive influence. “Operation from Russia that we have noticed since 2017. “
Launched after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Doppelgänger manages “a vast network of valid media spoofing” and stores links to those sites on social media.
Recently, Doppelgänger created a fake edition of the Washington Post to advertise an article linking billionaire George Soros to recent campus protests against Israel’s war against Hamas.
The Kremlin-linked operation also parodied NATO and targeted other countries, including Germany, France and Ukraine, according to Meta.
The others, those sites “appear to be nimble in temporarily reacting to global events in real time” and have benefited from anti-police protests in France and complaints about judicial reform in Israel, Meta said in a corporate report.
Chang says propaganda is rooted in some degree of fact and “located in existing tropes and narratives. “
“When you make up fiction in general, other people have a hard time believing it,” Chang says. “But if you base your propaganda on that kernel of truth, then at least you can move on from there and get that buy-in early on. “
Using his company’s search engine, Chang showed Sun-Times reporters how to locate social media posts on specific topics, adding the Democratic National Convention. He uncovered many of them, adding hate speech and predictions of violence at the convention, though Chang says it’s hard to know whether they came here from the U. S. , Russia or. . . And that’s the point.
“There’s quite a bit of discussion at this point in the event, you know?”Chang said.
“They don’t know in advance what’s really going to generate interest,” he says of Russian disinformation agents. “But once something starts to get attention, they’re definitely going to redouble their efforts. “
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