Hatewatch: Jack Posobiec Links to Russian Intelligence-Backed Website

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Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Michael Edison Hayden
@MichaelEHayden
NEW: The U.S. named an obscure website called "SouthFront" as being the product of Russian military intelligence.

Jack Posobiec linked to it 28 times in 10 months during the runup to the election, serving as a central source of its spread to Americans:

Jack Posobiec Links to Russian Intelligence-Backed Website
One America News Network (OANN) correspondent Jack Posobiec tweeted 28 times over a span of ten months links to a website the U.S. government says is backed by Russian intelligence.
splcenter.org
9:32 AM · Apr 28, 2021

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/04/28/jack-posobiec-links-russian-intelligence-backed-website

Posobiec repeatedly linked on Twitter to the obscure website “SouthFront,” which the U.S. Department of the Treasury named on April 15 in a statement explaining its enactment of sanctions on the Russian government, Hatewatch found. SouthFront, in turn, made posts promoting Posobiec. Southfront also cited Posobiec’s tweets in their posts, as they did in February when announcing that Senate Republicans acquitted President Trump on charges related to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Posobiec has used Twitter to promote Russian intelligence-backed propaganda before, as when he served as a central figure in spreading a hack of Emmanuel Macron’s emails in May 2017, as Hatewatch has previously reported.

The Department of the Treasury put in place those sanctions in response to attempts to “influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election at the direction of the leadership of the Russian Government,” the statement noted. The government described the website Posobiec shared dozens of times as being operated by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in an attempt to appeal to Western audiences:

SouthFront is an online disinformation site registered in Russia that receives taskings from the FSB. It attempts to appeal to military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists, all while going to great lengths to hide its connections to Russian intelligence. In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, SouthFront sought to promote perceptions of voter fraud by publishing content alleging that such activity took place during the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle.

Jack Posobiec tweeted a link to a SouthFront article about Libya in February 2020.
Posobiec shared to Twitter the 28 links to SouthFront from November 2019 to August 2020, all while working for the low-standard news network OANN, Hatewatch found. The OANN correspondent shared SouthFront links related to such subjects as Iran, Syria, Libya and China. (The web traffic analysis company Alexa suggests that SouthFront.org pulls most of its traffic from posts about Syria and its surrounding region.) Posobiec also shared SouthFront links focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and at least one post on the site that mocked concerns about Russian disinformation. Posobiec frequently deletes posts with disinformation or hateful language from Twitter after they have gone viral, as he did in 2017 after promoting on that site a neo-fascist Polish political movement that in the 1930s bombed Jewish homes.

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