troll farm

1 22 an no lnx

arizona Republican State Representative Jake Hoffman made news this week when it was revealed he signed a forged “certification” falsely stating Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won his state’s Electoral College electors.

Video that’s gone viral of Hoffman shows him defending signing the forged documents in which he falsely identifies himself as a duly elected elector for Trump.

His defense: “in unprecedented times, unprecedented action does occur.” He goes on to claim, “there is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing.”

He called the forged electoral documents “dueling opinions” in this video:

NEW In Arizona, journalism can be a team sport. GOP State Rep. Jake Hoffman refused to answer 12News photojournalist's question (which I provided) re why he signed phony declaration in 2020 that Arizona electors voted for Trump. Watch as AZRepublic's @ruelaswritings folos up...pic.twitter.com/Qp3YOLyBl9

— Brahm Resnik (@Brahm Resnik) 1642034260

The video has been viewed over 800,000 times in just 14 hours.

Hoffman, it turns out, was banned from Twitter after his company, Rally Forge, worked with Charlie Kirk’s far right wing political activist group, Turning Point USA during the 2020 election, establishing “a domestic ‘troll farm’ in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed,” according to The Guardian.

The Washington Post also reported that “the posts are the product of a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.”

Some of those teens, The Post noted, were minors.

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Conservative Youth Group Hires Teens to Covertly Spam a Pro-Trump Social Media Agenda

10/6/2020 by AUDREY GIBBS

“In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.”

Over the past few months, tweets and Facebook messages echoing Trump campaign talking points have been pouring in across social media platforms.

But these aren’t your usual random bots mass-releasing messages like “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci,” or falsely claiming mail-in ballots are bound to lead to election fraud.

A thorough investigation carried out by the Washington Post has uncovered these tweets and posts are being plastered by teens and young adults—some of whom are under the age of 18—hired by Turning Point Action (TPA), closely working with Turning Point USA, to spam their social media feeds with these types of messages.

Based in Phoenix, Turning Point USA is a conservative and outwardly pro-Trump youth organization, known for its outspoken young leader Charlie Kirk.

pix Jared Kushner with Charlie Kirk—founder and president of Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action—at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, D.C. ([Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

The posts in question include blatantly false information—such as claiming 28 million ballots have gone missing in the past four elections, or that the CDC is inflating the number of COVID deaths (In reality, the CDC count, if anything, is likely an underestimation).

Many parties have confirmed the legitimacy of the operation—from participating teens and their parents, to the friends of these teens who used Turning Point’s gig as a summer job.

Turning Point Action Pays Teens to Spread Lies on Social Media

So why pay young people to spread campaign propaganda? And how?

Most social media companies have guardrails in place to curtail the spread of misinformation on their platforms (like the kind Russia used during the 2016 campaign). For instance, Facebook prevents users from operating multiple accounts.

Prior to a rebuke from Twitter and Facebook, TPA’s underground social media campaign had found a secretive way to carefully navigate around these platforms’ rules by employing humans (not bots) using their own personal accounts.

The campaign’s structure was simple: Participants pulled the post’s basic language from a shared online document. Before posting, TPA instructed the teens to tweak the language to make them seem more authentic and “posted the same lines a limited number of times to avoid automated detection by the technology companies.”

In response to the Post investigation, Twitter suspended at least 20 accounts involved with the campaign, citing “platform manipulation and spam.”

Twitter commented on the ordeal:

You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.

Facebook too removed a number of accounts; the company says an investigation is ongoing.

Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, classified this type of behavior as a troll farming initiative.

“The scale and scope of domestic disinformation is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could do to us,” said Brookie. “In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.”

Despite the acknowledgement from those directly involved in the spread of disinformation, as well as experts and the social media platforms themselves, TPA maintains the efforts are simply a result of youth activism. Charlie Kirk has defended the group’s behavior, stating any comparison to a troll farm is a serious “mischaracterization.”