Who needs Russian trolls when you have the Trump Jugend to do the job on social media.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that a leading conservative youth organization enlisted Arizona teens in a secretive campaign to pump out messages echoing talking points from Trump’s reelection campaign.
The Post, citing four people with independent knowledge of the effort, reported that teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to put out messages on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook at the direction of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, which is based in Phoenix.
The messages mainly appeared as replies to news stories posted on social media. They played down the threat from COVID-19, claiming the Centers for Disease Control was deliberately inflating the death toll and warning that Dr. Anthony Fauci should not be trusted. (Ironically the coronavirus claimed the life of retired marketer Bill Montgomery, co-founder of Turning Point USA.)
They claimed Democrats were using mail balloting to steal the election. They likened Black Lives Matter protesters to “fascist groups . . . terrorizing American citizens.”
And the messages targeted Joe Biden, with one message claiming that the Democratic nominee “is being controlled by behind the scenes individuals who want to take America down the dangerous path towards socialism.”
The newspaper reported that the posts were the product of a sprawling secretive campaign that experts say was intended to evade guardrails introduced by social media companies to limit the spread of online disinformation after Russian trolls meddled in the 2016 election.
Experts tracking deceptive online practices told the Post that the effort by the tax-exempt non-profit was among the most ambitious domestic influence campaigns uncovered in the 2020 election.
“In 2016, there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a troll farm and writing salacious articles for money,” Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told the Post. “In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.”
The Post article said: “The campaign draws on the spam-like behavior of bots and trolls, with the same or similar language posted repeatedly across social media. But it is carried out, at least in part, by humans paid to use their own accounts, though nowhere disclosing their relationship with Turning Point Action or the digital firm brought in to oversee the day-to-day activity.“
An examination by The Post and an assessment by an independent specialist in data science said the the campaign “generated thousands of posts this summer on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.”
Teenagers involved in the campaign identified themselves only as Trump supporters and young Republicans, the Post reported. Some used their real names, while others used pseudonyms.
The Post said that in response to its questions, both Twitter and Facebook suspended or removed a number of accounts involved in the activity.
Turning Point Action leader Charlie Kirk, 26, delivered the opening speech at last month’s Republican National Convention, praising Trump s the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”
Turning Point’s field director Austin Smith issued a statement defending the social media campaign , saying it was “sincere political activism conducted by real people who passionately hold the beliefs they describe online, not an anonymous troll farm in Russia.”
One parent Robert Jason Noonan told The Post that his two teenage daughters were being paid by Turning Point to push “conservative points of view and values” on social media. Noonan said his daughters were classified as independent contractors and sometimes worked out of a Phoenix-area office.