Russian media outlet RBC lead an investigation into the Kremlin’s cyber ops and discovered an Instagram account, that is now deleted, which was used to heavily promote feminism, with content being promoted by Women’s March organizers was, in fact, ran by Russian operatives.
The account, @feminism_tag on Instagram, had tens of thousands of followers.
The report, along with others, has shown that the reach of such Russian propaganda via Feminism was used on social sharing sites such as Facebook.
As reported by Peter Hasson for The Daily Caller:
The account promoted the view, popular among left-wing feminists, that women don’t have equal rights in America. “We fight to achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women!” the account’s description read.
One post read: “I would rather be the ‘obnoxious feminist girl’ than be complicit in my own dehumanization.”
Another post showed a young, long-haired child holding a sign that read: “I’m the SCARY transgender person the media WARNED you about.”
Archived versions of the account show it had at least 46,000 followers as of March 2017.
The account’s posts were often shared on Facebook.
One post that was shared by Women’s March’s South Carolina branch showed a picture of a girl holding a sign that read: “I need feminism because my 12-year-old sisters already cares about how much she eats.”
The Women’s March page credited the Russian propaganda account for the post, which is still live on Facebook.
From RBC (using Google translate) – it’s a rough read but interesting nonetheless.
RBC magazine conducted its [own] investigation: we managed to find and confirm the involvement of employees from Savushkin, at least 120 communities and thematic accounts, and analyze their content and calculate the total costs for the campaigns. Is the scale of the work of the “troll factory” comparable with the excitement caused in the US around this story?
[…]
Through such announcements, Savushkina recruited people who would take on the work with the American communities in real time, an ex-employee of the “factory” told RBC magazine. Another former employee adds that it was just from the beginning of the spring of 2015 that they began to “issue tasks to discredit the image of candidates” that will go to the presidential elections in the United States.
[…]
The [people who provided this information] to RBC stated: on Twitter, advertising was not bought, as it was not bought on Tumblr or Imgur. “We spent a little bit on the promotion of Twitter-accounts – they wrote bots to gain mass, but it’s [a small] expense,” the employee of the “factory” explains. According to him, in the Facebook communities, the bots were not used, because “it does not make sense, we needed live people”, but RBC magazine could not verify this.
