The role of new media

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While not US politics, but the Russians are far from alone to deploy troll factories..

For several months in 2017 Alex, whose name has been changed, alleges he was one of more than 20 people inside a secretive cyber army that pumped out messages from fake social media accounts to support then Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as “Ahok”, as he fought for re-election. “They told us you should have five Facebook accounts, five Twitter accounts and one Instagram,” he told the Guardian. “And they told us to keep it secret. They said it was ‘war time’ and we had to guard the battleground and not tell anyone about where we worked.” The Jakarta election – which saw the incumbent Ahok, a Chinese Christian, compete against the former president’s son Agus Yudhoyono, and the former education minister, Anies Baswedan – churned up ugly religious and racial divisions. It culminated in mass Islamic rallies and allegations that religion was being used for political gain. Demonstrators called for Ahok to be jailed on contentious blasphemy charges. The rallies were heavily promoted by an opaque online movement known as the Muslim Cyber Army, or the MCA, which employed hundreds of fake and anonymous accounts to spread racist and hardline Islamic content designed to turn Muslim voters against Ahok. Alex says his team was employed to counter the deluge of anti-Ahok sentiment, including hashtags that critiqued opposition candidates, or ridiculed their Islamic allies.

'I felt disgusted': inside Indonesia's fake Twitter account factories | World news | The Guardian

And Indonesia is hardly alone, this stuff is spreading like wildfire, with deadly consequences (like the fake accusations of child abduction in India, which have already cost several people gruesome deaths).