Report: Russians used memes by conservative student activists

Turning Point USA, the conservative grassroots network that expects to draw 5,000 young activists to West Palm Beach for a four-day conference that starts Wednesday, unwittingly helped Russian trolls who co-opted and amplified the group’s memes as their own, according to a U.S. Senate report released Monday.

The details are among the findings in one of two reports commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that assessed interference by state-sponsored Russian trolls in the 2016 presidential election on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Gab, Meetup, VKontakte, and LiveJournal.

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Together, the reports describe a round-the-clock state-sponsored campaign orchestrated by the Internet Research Agency, known as IRA, that directed thousands of operatives, called trolls, to post content with the goal of dividing Americans by race, religion and politics using false, inflammatory and misleading information about candidates, issues and events.

Turning Point, which has over 1.1 million likes on Facebook and is known for its snarky posts, was quick to condemn the use of its content by IRA operatives.

“Our content reaches billions of eyeballs every year, and it’s shared by top influencers across all social media platforms," a Turning Point spokesperson wrote in a statement. "We can’t control who shares our content, and we condemn adversarial foreign actors that attempt to use any tactics to divide our country.”

Researchers estimated that Russian-sponsored content reached over 126 million people on Facebook and at least 20 million on Instagram. There is no evidence that Turning Point, as an organization, knowingly allowed their content to be used by the trolls. Rather, the trolls co-opted the group's memes and other postings. 

The IRA had a "very clear bias" for then-candidate Donald Trump and began posting its pro-Trump content during the primaries, according to the report. Researchers found no pro-Clinton content on Facebook or Instagram, aside from an event that urged Muslims to publicly demonstrate in support of Clinton's candidacy.

Right-leaning Facebook posts denigrated the U.S. media and intelligence community as untrustworthy and belittled conservative leaders such as U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., and the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., while elevating Donald Trump, according to the report.

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Similar attacks on Democratic leaders portrayed them as "corporatists or too close to neo-cons and promoted Green Party and Democratic Socialist themes," the report noted.

Researchers concluded that the Russian campaign "was designed to exploit societal fractures, blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself."

"With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future," the report concluded.

Turning Point USA was singled out in the report by New Knowledge, cybersecurity company of national security, digital media and machine learning experts, as an example of the agency's deep knowledge of American culture, media and influencers. According to report, the IRA shared brand-marked Turning Point memes or grabbed Turning Point memes, re-branded them with logos from bogus Russian accounts and distributed them on pages that targeted youth.

Turning Point USA is a non-profit founded in 2012 to educate and promote activism skills among high school and college students. According to the group’s website, it is the largest and fastest growing youth organization in the U.S. and has a presence on over 1,300 college campuses.

In November 2016, the group grabbed headlines when it launched its Professor Watchlist, an online project that aims to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Turning Point’s Student Action Summit begins Wednesday and continues through Saturday at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. The event expects to draw 5,000 student activists — making it one of the larger conventions hosted at the convention center.

The group, which also held its annual summit in West Palm Beach last year, draws some of the biggest names in the Trump administration and conservative news outlets. Speakers include Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, film-maker Dinesh D’Souza, former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci and Governor-elect Ron DeSantis.

The group will honor conservative talk show host and Palm Beach resident Rush Limbaugh at a $2,500-per-person gala at Mar-a-Lago Wednesday nightt.

cstapleton@pbpost.com

@StapletonPBPost