The Biden administration's sanctions against Russia for its repeated attempts to interfere with the American Presidential elections are already impacting Twitter, as some of the biggest right-wing accounts have been revealed to have played a part in the disinformation campaign.
The joint effort from the Departments of Justice, State, and Treasury revealed what longtime Twitter users have known for a while:
Russian state-sponsored actors have used a variety of tools, such as AI deep fakes and disinformation, in an attempt to undermine confidence in the American election process.
Beginning in early 2024, executives at RT (Russia’s state-funded news media outlet) began an even more nefarious effort to covertly recruit allegedly "unwitting" American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign.
RT used a front company to disguise its own involvement and the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence U.S. audiences.
However, it's hard to believe that these influencers, namely Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool, among others, didn't know what they were doing when they accepted $400,000 a month to tweet anti-American rhetoric, including tweets portraying Ukraine as the aggressor after being invaded by Russia.
Those tweets are elevated and promoted by Elon Musk, who has openly supported Donald Trump by tweeting AI-generated images of Vice President Kamala Harris and other Russian-funneled disinformation.
Since Musk deliberately destroyed Twitter--which most people will never call "X" and may not have to for much longer--hate speech has risen exponentially on Twitter.
Those accounts and the Russian-generated MAGA bot accounts tormented Democrats online, employing projection language to frame high-profile liberal accounts as "paid bad actors." Tweets accused liberals of being backed by George Soros, just one of many anti-Semitic dog-whistles they use along with "globalist" and "Christian Nationalist."
And you can thank them for the whole "anti-woke" thing when they can't even define "woke."
Twitter users were eating up the schadenfreude on Thursday, openly slamming the actual paid bad actors whom no one believes were "duped" into accepting millions of dollars to tweet Russian propaganda.