Report: Russians used Bernie Bros as unwitting agents in disinformation campaign.

[synergie]

168. Nope. And it wasn't about the average Bernie supporter, it was a malignant

group of "people" online who were engaging in vicious and nasty behavior, and whom some gullible Bernie folks thought were real, and whose lead they followed.

It wasn't about ridiculing anyone, it was about calling out the very real misogyny and abuse that was being heaped on literally anyone who was calling out the ridiculousness that was being spread around. All you had to do was *question* the validity of using Right Wing talking points (obvious and simple ones like calling her all those not-so-clever variations of her name, substituting "kill" and "shrill" for the first syllable) and you would be called a "hillbot", accused of being an employee of David Brock, a Republican, and basically just sworn at, by a bunch of people obviously working together. That was just on the comment sections and twitter and an average person (this happened to me.)

What happened to journalists, especially female journalists and a other women in the public eye was worse. There were death threats, people saying they should be raped, attacking their children, their personal details being put out. That was not something that Bernie supporters I've met in real life would do. But they were being told by various, now suspect sources, that these were lies being told to bash Bernie supporters (when literally everyone made the distinction between a supporter and an online "bro&quot . They were told that these were attacks against *them* and would literally blind themselves to what they were seeing. I guess when you tell yourself that the person that your online friends were attacking with the worst sort of abuse was some sort of "other" who was attacking *you*, it's easier to sit back and let it happen, or not see what was going on.

I'm not sure if you've seen the piece by the gentleman who testified the other day, Clinton Watts, I posted the article in a thread. In it, he goes into the goals of the Trumpbots trolling for Trump, and he quickly makes it clear that it wasn't about installing Trump, it was about causing chaos and instability and given that even they thought Hillary was going to win, dividing the left and making them hate her for the same reasons the GOP did (by using their own decades worth of slime) makes a lot of sense. Then you look at the "bots" who were outed, and the coordination of their talking points, and then see the places where these pro-Bernie pages were being set up from, and what sorts of fake news they were promoting and see how that got amplified, you understand the depth and breadth about what was going on here.