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By Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes
WASHINGTON – For some of President Trump’s loudest porners, it’s a story too clever to be verified: Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland, Oregon, burned a pile of Bibles and then drowned the chimney with American flags. There’s even a video to convert it.
The story was almost perfectly a central theme of Trump’s crusade, with liberals and Democrats, the ungodly mess, and went viral among Republicans hours after giving the impression of the above this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, said of the protesters: “This is what they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that the antifa had moved on to “the e-book burning phase.”
The much more mundane fact. Some of the thousands of protesters appear to have burned a singles Bible, and perhaps a moment, to light a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.
However, in the haste to paint all the protesters as Bible fanatics, few politicians or commentators who intervened in the incident took the time to read about the veracity of the story or perceive that it originated from a Kremlin-backed story. video news agency. And now, a few days later, the Portland Bible fires seem to be one of the first viral successes of Russian misinformation from the 2020 presidential campaign.
As Election Day approaches, Russian efforts to influence voting appear to be well advanced. U.S. intelligence officials said last week that Russia had a variety of techniques to denigrate Democrats and their supposed presidential candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., national manifestations of racial justice.
Russian officials have aggressively sought to refute the allegations. But U.S. officials are confident in their assessment and say Russian tactics are evolving. Moscow, they say, has moved away from fake social media accounts and bots used through the Internet Research Agency and other equipment to magnify fake articles ahead of the 2016 vote. Instead, Russians rely on English-language news sites to spread incendiary stories that can be collected and disseminated among Americans, many of whom have been as enthusiastic as foreign powers to stoke partisan divisions in the United States.
The Russian strategy is a type of cash laundering, similar to cash laundering. The stories come from Russian-backed news sites, some of which are directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then absorbed by Americans on social media or national media, and their origins are temporarily obscured. Often, when a story reaches the fullest of its American audience, there is no indication that it has been created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.
Some of the media used in Russia are well known, such as RT, the Kremlin-funded operation whose video news company Ruptly posted a video of the Bible fire. Others are darker, adding some similar to Russian spy agencies, and are used to actively verify themes and stories to see which ones work best.
Some stories are designed to appeal to conservatives, others to one that may be best described as the option left. Many of them are meant to exacerbate racial tensions before the election, officials said this year, long before recent civil rights protests began.
Some of the stories spread through the Russian media are real fictionals. But the useful maxims, the probably viral maxim, are those that have a real core, like the history of biblical fires in Portland. It proposes a case study on the operation of the Russian data laundering operation and on the strength of this weapon.
The video on which the story is based comes from Ruptly, who broadcasts live events for a few hours each night, then trims a short video of the highlights in combination. The live stream and music video later posted through Ruptly show at least one Bible in the chimney after midnight on August 1, while some protesters attempted to make a chimney. Another clip shows what might have been the same Bible or a second. You can see a small crowd hanging, some of the other people watching the flames rise, but the level turns out and sounds like it’s away from the main show action.
The Bible appears to be used as ignition wood through two protesters running over the fire. There is no discernible reaction from the crowd when the e-book catches fire with twigs and branches, pages of notebooks and newspapers. The crowd applauds when an American flag is thrown into the flames.
Aside from cameraman Ruptly, only another journalist, a local television journalist, learned of the Engraving of the Bible and wrote it in a bachelor prayer in a long report on that night’s protests. The story, through KOIN, the local affiliate of cbs News, also reported that a women’s organization calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to turn off the chimney, a detail not included in Ruptly’s video, which was edited to chain in combination. a series of clips of the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck delivering loose Bibles at the protests the night before, it was unclear if he was providing the burnt e-book.)
Instead, Ruptly engraved the Bible in the midst of his protest that night. The news firm tweeted the video twice on August 1, here and here, and posted it on its website. In the tweets and text that accompany the video on the firm’s website, the engraving of the Bible is presented as the central occasion of the night; the engraving of the flag is secondary. RT, the network run by Ruptly, also wrote a complete story about the engraving of the Bible.
Ruptly and RT then let Twitter take care of that.
The video was first tweeted through an account listing two cities, Oklahoma City and Abu Dhabi, as the location of its users and has only a few dozen subscribers. It was erased a while later. But before he disappeared, the tweet was broadcast via a Malay named Ian Miles Cheong, who amassed a lot of fans on Twitter by betting on a right-wing American storyteller on social media.
Cheong added his own commentary to the initial tweet, savagely exaggerating what Ruptly’s video showed. “Left-wing activists are bringing a lot of Bibles to burn in Portland’s federal court,” he wrote.
His tweet has temporarily become the basis of a full day of outrage from the right-wing media, Republican politicians and right-wing commentators of choice. It is Mr. Cheong, whose tweet prompted young Trump, Mr. Cruz and many other high-ranking Republicans to have their say. It has also been presented as evidence of the depravity of the protesters through prominent right-of-choice conspiracy theorists like Jack. Postobiec.Array correspondent of One America News Network, much appreciated throughout the president.
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