Oh, damn. She went there!

[pnwmom]

75. Then why didn't Bernie's campaign speak out against it when they became aware?

And why did Mattes, who noticed the activity start in March 2016, wait till September 2016 to inform Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration? Had he told Bernie? What had Bernie done? Nothing we know of publicly.


STORY FROM LAST JULY (says the troll activity started in March 2016):

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/donald-trump-russia-investigation-fake-news-hillary-clinton

A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.

SNIP

He was particularly struck by a report on 10 August that formed part of the dossier on the Russian interference campaign compiled by the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, which quoted an unnamed Trump associate discussing a Russian-driven campaign to alienate Sanders supporters from Clinton.

“He was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn’t articulate until September,” he said. Because the Sanders online campaign was so open, democratic and relatively unregulated, Mattes says he now realises: “We basically set ourselves up to be victims of an international cyberwarfare campaign. We were pawns in this but very effective pawns.”

STORY FROM TODAY (says the troll activity started "after Sanders was beat out by Hillary Clinton."

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Bernie-Sanders-HIllary-Clinton-Social-Media-Russian-Infiltration-Campaign-474369533.html

A San Diego man who organized Bernie Sander’s local Facebook group during the 2016 presidential election told NBC 7 he noticed traces of Russia’s hidden social media trolling campaign years ago.

After Sanders was beat out by Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, he noticed something was a little off.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people were joining Bernie Sanders pages on Facebook for a campaign that was over. It made no sense.” John Mattes told NBC 7.

Mattes resorted to checking other Bernie Sanders pages around the country. “It was everywhere," he said. Mattes noticed that the posts had a similar theme. "‘Anti-Hillary’, ‘Hillary is sick’, ‘Hillary is involved in Al Qaeda’, ‘Hillary’s getting money from the Russians’”.

“I started digging deeper, tried to look at the servers, I tried to look at the IP address of these people,” Mattes added. Soon, he realized that the people behind these accounts weren't actually people.