How I Fell in Love With A Russian Bot
One More Take On Our ‘Post-Truth Era’
I regret to inform you that I have been compromised. Well, sort of. After Facebook’s July 31 deletion of three event pages due to their suspected connection to an Internet Research Agency political influence campaign, I opened my browser to summon that blue landscape where ennui is born and reason goes to die; and, instead of my usual dose of memes, well-tailored headlines, and nauseating photos of people pretending to be happy, I got a message.
Apparently, the message informed me, I had fallen for a campaign planned by Russian “trolls”. To be specific, I followed three of their Facebook pages, and I bought a bus ticket to a protest after communicating with “activist” admins that, it turns out, were really just men in a basement of the Internet Research Agency office located somewhere across the world in St. Petersburg, Russia. They wanted to sow discord. It worked.
But to be honest, I don’t think they get that much credit.
Because I cannot tell you now where hostile campaigns end and organic movements begin. That’s what made my discovery surreal- the two were virtually indiscernible. One such tool of “information warfare” deployed by these foreign agents was a Facebook page about meditation. My question is- why? And if information gets…
