Thousands of Americans attended a march last November organized by a Russian group that used social media to interfere in the 2016 election.
The demonstration in New York City, which took place a few days after the election, appears to be the largest and most successful known effort to date pulled off by Russian-linked groups intent on using social media platforms to influence American politics.
Sixteen thousand Facebook users said that they planned to attend a Trump protest on Nov. 12, 2016, organized by the Facebook page for BlackMattersUS, a Russian-linked group that sought to capitalize on racial tensions between black and white Americans. The event was shared with 61,000 users.
As many as 5,000 to 10,000 protesters actually convened at Manhattan’s Union Square, where they then marched to Trump Tower, according to media reports at the time.
The BlackMattersUS-organized rally took advantage of outrage among groups on the left following President Trump’s victory on Nov. 8, to galvanize support for its event. The group’s protest was the fourth consecutive anti-Trump rally in New York following election night, and one of many across the country.
“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!” reads the Facebook event page for the rally. “Divided is the reason we just fell. We must unite despite our differences to stop HATE from ruling the land.”
While the focus has been on Russian efforts ahead of the election, the BlackMatters rally days after Trump’s victory shows that Russian-linked social media influence efforts continued after the election.
The BlackMatters organizing group was connected to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian “troll farm” with ties to the Kremlin, according to a recent investigation by the Russian Magazine RBC. Facebook has identified the IRA as the group responsible for purchasing 3,000 political ads on Facebook’s platform and operating 470 accounts that appear to have attempted to influence the perspectives of Americans during the 2016 elections.
Facebook has since deleted those 470 accounts. BlackMatters’s account has been deleted as well, although Facebook has not officially confirmed the reason for BlackMatters being deleted from its site. Twitter also appears to have deleted an account associated with the group, possibly in its own purge of accounts linked to Russian actors.
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Thousands of Americans attended protest secretly organized by Russians: https://t.co/TcQ0CeOXkQ pic.twitter.com/bbVnk2vzZE
— The Hill (@thehill) October 31, 2017
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