Is This Something That They Made Up or Something Like That?

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Black fatherhood was a really big theme um some of that was pushing the names on black fatherhood yeah there's black hair a lot of beauty fashion. Black don't crack was a sort of phrase that i would reach out to researchers who study trolls also my data set was ndade so i could not send them the memes but i would say like so what do you know about this hashtag uh because this is not content that i am regularly pushed as a white woman and they were just taking and repurposing hashtags and phrases and memes and visuals including that real black women had posted themselves.

Today’s online propaganda has evolved in unforeseeable and seemingly absurd ways; by laughing at or spreading a Kermit the Frog meme, you may be unwittingly advancing the Russian agenda. These campaigns affect our elections integrity, public health, and relationships. In this episode, the first of two parts, disinformation expert Renee DiResta talks with Tristan and Aza about how these tactics work, how social media platforms’ algorithms and business models allow foreign agents to game the system, and what these messages reveal to us about ourselves. Renee gained unique insight into this issue when in 2017 Congress asked her to lead a team of investigators analyzing a data set of texts, images and videos from Facebook, Twitter and Google thought to have been created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. She shares what she learned, and in part two of their conversation, Renee, Tristan and Aza will discuss what steps can be taken to prevent this kind of manipulation in the future.