Russian bots… Fueling decisiveness and swaying elections?

[misteraven]

After reading about this phenomenon for a good while on MSM about there’s legions of Russian bots out there clogging social media in an effort to sow dissent, fuel hyper decisiveness and sway elections, I just caught one here on our very own forum. A user named @andrewm82 registered and within an hour, bumped an old thread about the mail in ballot fuckery with the comment in the attached screen shot… Language is close, but slightly off as you can see, but the red flag was that the user registered and then bumped an older thread with their first comment being some dissenting political shit. I found it suspect and sure enough, the IP geo locates back to the Ukraine. 
 

Anyhow, found this fascinating and scary. I’ll bet you can likely Google that username and find similar comments on other forums or comment sections. Again, when you consider what this is and what it represents, it’s some pretty fucked up shit. 
 

cc: @abrasivesaint

 

[LUGR]

I thought that was just @Dirty_habiTnew screen name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kults]

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-the-troll-factory-at-the-center-of-russias-election-meddling-campaign/

[Kults]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x3zy9/inside-an-instagram-bot-farm

[ndv]

I wonder how many MSM broadcasters rent offices in that building.   I am sure if we have Isreal bomb the building, we'll find out. 😉

[Dark_Knight]

@chillozopheris prob a bot too. Only contributions have been righty memes in political memes thread with no commentary. 

[ndv]

Good catch @misteraven  this type of thing is exactly why we need a board and rules.  Imo, I think the 'new user' should be removed amd banned.

 

Anyhow, great post @Kults

[misteraven]

9 hours ago, Dark_Knight said:

@chillozopheris prob a bot too. Only contributions have been righty memes in political memes thread with no commentary. 

think you might be right… two IP’s across 15 posts: Canada and OH. Email is a polish domain. Google search of the name shows similar posts on other platforms. Good catch… Ban hammered. 

[misteraven]

let me know if you spot any other suspect posts / accounts. 

[Mercer]

9 hours ago, Dark_Knight said:

@chillozopheris prob a bot too. Only contributions have been righty memes in political memes thread with no commentary. 

 

 

Probably a 2016 era bot, considering it's still posting Michelle Obama memes in 2021. 

[misteraven]

2 minutes ago, Mercer said:

 

 

Probably a 2016 era bot, considering it's still posting Michelle Obama memes in 2021. 

LOL

[abrasivesaint]

This is  probably completely unrelated, a bit of a stretch, and sort of a long story, but here we go.. 

 

After my motorcycle wreck in 2013 i was bed ridden for quite a few months. I got real heavy into GTAV, specifically team death match battles. The “crew” i played with created our own tournament which gained a lot of traction within the world we were playing in, and we eventually became one of the most well known yet small knit crews that took part in TDMs. We were actually one of the 2 teams Rockstar originally promoted on their Twitch account in a live GTAV-TDM. We got serious enough in the TDMs that we started an email group/KIK chat for those of us who participated in the matches to figure out when the next match was, and so on..

 

...any who...

 

One of our members was a girl from the Ukraine. Her voice was oddly high pitched, and she played with us for quite some time, months to years.. one day someone, for whatever reason (i cant recall), decided to do some digging. Well they found out this person wasn’t a girl at all, it was some Russian dude. This then made sense to us as to why her voice was so oddly high pitched, because it wasn’t natural.
 

The next time “she” got online someone called them out on it. Without saying a word this dude logged off, blocked all of us from any sort of communication we had with them, and about a week or so later i believe the account was deleted completely from Rockstar Social Club and the PSN. We never heard from him again...

 

Now, i understand this is probably pretty far fetched, but it did cross a few of our minds that maybe this was some sort of social “study” on American culture. But, we were one of the more well known crews, playing one of the most popular video games at the time, and it just so happened a Russian dude poses as a Ukrainian chick, and when is called on it, bails and deletes everything... seemed

odd.
 

Obviously it could have been just some sort of extreme case of trolling or whatever you’d call it, but it got us thinking. 
 

edit: just for a little more info/clarification.. A lot of us “knew” each other after a while because we became friends on Facebook, had each others phones numbers, ect.. I’ve met a couple of these people in real life, i was just talking to a few of them earlier today. So it’s not like this person just pulled some random Russian dude out of a hat and made claims, there was some sort of trail that led back to them. I dont remember it all, because it really wasnt important enough to keep that sort of information haha.. but at the time a lot of it made sense and shit was added up. 
 

You may think “but why GTAV?” Well, if you’ve ever played GTAV online, it’s almost nothing BUT division and “us vs them”, and “fuck you bitch” “fuck Obama” “fuck you (n-bomb)” and so on.. if you wanna figure out a way to get Americans to be at each others throats, video games are a HELL of a place to take some notes.

Edited May 27, 2021 by abrasivesaint