Many of those apparently viral memes and hashtags you’re seeing attacking leading Democratic presidential prospects are in fact a “sustained and ongoing” coordinated attack, Politico reports. The tech company Guardians.ai ran an analysis of social media activity against Democratic presidential candidates or potential candidates, and found that Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke are the top targets, with “clear signs of a coordinated effort of undetermined size that shares similar characteristics with the computational propaganda attacks launched by online trolls at Russia’s Internet Research Agency in the 2016 presidential election,” though Russia isn’t the only possible foreign state actor that could be involved in such attacks.
About 200 social media accounts are at the center of the effort—and the same accounts were active in trying to attack and divide during the 2018 midterm elections. This is not a minor effort: “Over a recent 30-day period, between 2 and 15 percent of all Twitter mentions of the four candidates emanated in some way from within that cluster of accounts, according to the Guardians.ai findings. In that timeframe, all four candidates collectively had 6.8 million mentions on Twitter.”
“It looks like the 2020 presidential primary is going to be the next battleground to divide and confuse Americans,” Guardians.ai’s Brett Horvath told Politico. “As it relates to information warfare in the 2020 cycle, we’re not on the verge of it—we’re already in the third inning.”