Russian state media, government spokespeople and pro-Kremlin bloggers portrayed the attempted assassination of the former president donald trump as a sign of a country in decline, with some endorsing conspiratorial narratives and others elevating the voices of American politicians.
The propaganda – which appears in English and Russian, as well as Arabic, Spanish and other languages – is primarily aimed at audiences outside the United States with the aim of tarnishing America’s image among the Global South countries that Moscow is courting. to support its full-scale, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the researchers said.
So far there has been no evidence that Thomas Matthews Crooks, the 20-year-old who opened fire at a Trump rally on Saturday, was ideologically motivated or had any links with foreign or domestic accomplices. Authorities say they continue to look for a motive.
Russia has worked for years to inspire and amplify political divisions in the US, as documented by researchers, academics and national security officials. Social media campaigns based or supported by Russia have spread false and misleading information, first on social media platforms and, more recently, through fake local news sites.
But in the days following the shooting, the flood of baseless conspiracies Word circulating on social media about the assassination attempt was driven primarily by Americans, not foreign actors, and Russia or other U.S. adversaries appear to be biding their time before trying to manipulate or amplify the country’s deep divisions, said Bret Schafer, a researcher. senior at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a political advocacy group.
“I think it’s inevitable that at some point there will be evidence that accounts linked to Russia, botnets or whatever, will engage in conspiracy theories around this. That’s a given,” he said. But he added: “At least now, these things come from national players.”
Russia has no incentive to intervene at this time, given the level of vitriol and fear demonstrated in Americans’ online political posts, Schafer said.
“Right now, there is nothing they can do that will make the environment more toxic than it already is,” he said.
Some notable Russian figures have hinted or openly stated that the shooting was part of something larger, building on a trend started by American conspiracy theorists.
Margarita Simonyan, a supporter of President Vladimir Putin and editor-in-chief of the Russia Today media group, said the assassination attempt was like a TV series “made by an imaginative scriptwriter.” She referred to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, implying that it was a similar case to Saturday’s events.
“When all other options for getting rid of an inconvenient president are exhausted, good old Lee Harvey Oswald is brought in,” she wrote on social media.
Focusing on Russian and foreign audiences outside the United States, the propaganda seized on the attack on Trump as a sign of American instability and suggested or alleged without evidence that anti-Trump elements in the federal government were somehow behind the assassination attempt. .
After news broke that Trump had been shot at the rally in Pennsylvania, pro-Kremlin bloggers and officials “leaned immediately and deeply toward the conspiratorial, toward the idea that it was the Secret Service” that orchestrated the shooting, Emerson said. Brooking, a senior researcher at the Atlantic Council think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Russian state news organization Sputnik International filled its homepage with articles blaming the Secret Service and Biden administration for the shooting, including “How Secret service failure Trump and Why the Responsibility May Fall to Top Democrats” and “U.S. Secret Service Suspiciously Slow in Protecting Trump – Veteran Psyop.”
Conspiracy theories also flourished on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels. English and Russian channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, including “Russian Spring,” falsely blamed an “antifa activist” for the shooting. Others suggested, without evidence, that Trump had been targeted by Ukrainian assassins because his election would threaten U.S. aid to the country. Many simply republished posts from Republicans: American politicians, pundits, and influencers who blamed Democrats and the media for inciting the assassination attempt.
One of the most popular images on Russian-language social media since Saturday was a photo of Trump juxtaposed with the Kennedy assassination, an apparent nod to conspiracies about JFK’s assassination being an inside job, said Brooking, who monitors Russian information operations and from other countries. foreign regimes. NBC News has not seen these posts.
Russian officials focused primarily on America’s polarized politics.
Russian politicians and journalists also widely claimed that Trump would see an increase in his electoral chances, according to a report by Russia Mattersa project of the Harvard Kennedy School.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said after Saturday’s shooting that U.S. democracy “has been driven to a suicidal state by liberalism.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov blamed the Biden administration for employing partisan rhetoric that he said created the conditions for the attempt on Trump’s life, an echo of criticism leveled at the White House by Republican lawmakers.
While Russia has so far not appeared to introduce its own false information into online conversations about the assassination attempt, researchers say it is only a matter of time before Moscow resorts to its usual tactic of creating new disinformation and disseminating it widely. to try to worsen the existing one. political divisions among Americans.
“Most of what is being said on the Russian platforms we are tracking is an echo or a quote of theories originating in the United States,” Brooking said. “So it is more true that these Russian influencers encountered narratives that basically agreed with their belief that this was a conspiracy. “
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council said foreign adversaries often try to stoke divisions in American society, but did not cite examples related to Saturday’s assassination attempt.
“We know that foreign actors actively seek to sow and exacerbate divisions and undermine trust in our democratic institutions. This is something we will not tolerate and will respond if we see them engaging in such activity,” the spokesperson told NBC News in an email.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA declined to comment.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said on Sunday that the number of threats of online violence in the US, which had already been rising, increased after the assassination attempt.
“We saw people going online and trying to imitate or impersonate the shooter who has obviously passed away,” he said.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
