The post you are reporting:
Those naughty Russkies at it again.
The Kremlin is targeting British teenagers as part of a covert campaign to sow discord among young westerners, The Times can reveal. Russian-run accounts have posed as Harry Potter fans and used images of celebrities such as the actress Emma Watson to amass young followers on social networks.
Thousands of young Britons have also been exposed to a Kremlin-financed YouTube channel that has been described as “the Blue Peter of Russian propaganda” and which has sought to create confusion about the Salisbury poisoning.
The full scale of Russia’s disinformation campaign can be disclosed today after analysis of more than three million tweets and other social media messages collected by US researchers. Kremlin-controlled accounts portray GM foods and other biotech advances as dangerous, the analysis shows. This newspaper has previously revealed how Russian “trolls” promoted discredited theories about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Russia has also attempted to stir public panic after terrorist attacks in London as well as disseminating misinformation on Brexit and the issue of Scottish independence. Individual accounts that bear Russian hallmarks have achieved hundreds of thousands of mentions and retweets on Twitter this year despite an attempted crackdown by the social media company.
“What they are doing is political warfare on an industrialised scale, and it is aimed at all western democracy,” Darren Linvill, a specialist in Russian disinformation from Clemson University in South Carolina, said. “It is well funded, it is dangerous and it is hiding in plain sight.” Moscow’s disinformation campaign is being run in parallel with an international hacking operation that was exposed on Thursday when western intelligence agencies showed that one unit tried to hack the international chemical weapons watchdog while it was investigating the Salisbury poisonings.
Russian hackers were also linked to attacks on a US nuclear power developer, anti-doping agencies and authorities investigating the suspected Russian-linked downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet. The GRU military intelligence agency, which was responsible for the attempts, was further embarrassed last night when the names of hundreds of their spies were apparently revealed.
The social media disinformation effort has been led by the Internet Research Agency, an operation based in St Petersburg and allegedly funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” for his ties to the Russian leader. One research agency account tried to appeal to western teenagers by posing as a supporter of gay rights. It encouraged schoolchildren to disrupt lessons with political protests, posting the message: “A little drama in the classroom is necessary once in a while.”
