#TrollTracker: interesting troll spike from the pro-Kremlin / pro-Assad gang against @janinedigi.
Image: @Sysomos scan of traffic over the past 7 days.
For those who don't know @janinedigi, here's a list of her awards as a war correspondent.
She reported from places including Grozny, Kosovo, Palestine, Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Source: janinedigiovanni.com/awards-and-rec…
Here's the tweet which triggered the storm: a post saying that RT and Sputnik are not journalists.
That's a hell of a call for a genuine award-winning journalist to make, so let's look at evidence.
RT's chief editor has said, on the record, that RT was "conducting the information war against the whole Western world" in 2008.
She compared it to the Russian military.
Hard to reconcile "conducting the information war" with journalism.
medium.com/dfrlab/questio…
The founding charter of Sputnik's parent agency, Rossiya Segodnya, says its jobs include "securing the national interests of the Russian Federation in the information sphere."
Makes a mockery of the claim of being independent journalism, really.
medium.com/dfrlab/putinat…
There wasn't actually much pushback to begin with, as the timeline shows.
The better-performing posts actually came a couple of days later. This was one of the most-retweeted, from an RT/Sputnik contributor.
For clarity, that was a response to @janinedigi refusing to call RT/Sputnik journalists, not to RT contributor Mark Sleboda refusing to call her one.
This was the tweet which really called in the trolls.
Note the failure to stick to the actual subject (RT / Sputnik), let alone the evidence.
An ill-considered post, given how many of those wars Janine actually covered.
Plenty of familiar names among the accounts which started attacking thereafter.
This is a konwn harassment group, active since at least 2016.
More examples at medium.com/dfrlab/trolltr…
Again per @Sysomos, it didn't get particularly wide reach. That probably wasn't the intention.
Sentiment summaries should always be viewed with extreme caution, but even with the caveats, this is quite telling.
That's how troll brigades work. Find one target and bombard it.
Welcome to our world.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.