Why Russia targets Black voters in US elections
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So??? foreign countries have done this before during vietnam, during the civil war, during the american - british war... everyone knows black americans disgruntled...
How many registered black voters decided not to vote because of online Russian propaganda? Show me the numbers? Anyone peddling this low impact bullshyt thinks black voters are stupid or easily influenced. In reality, we are some of the most sophisticated users of social media.
Anecdotally, can anyone find me at least a dozen or so black people that were legitimately influenced by that Russian gibberish messaging? You can find just about one Negro to say just about anything and go on television, yet I haven't seen one black person to date say they decided to not vote because of proven Russian bot activity.
The internet is not television where you are force-fed content. Older black voters who are the most reliable are voting regardless of whatever they see on Facebook and millennials tend to gravitate towards curated news and online spaces that emphasize their preexisting worldview on politics, voting, or whatever the fukk else.
I'm more liable to believe a random black person sent money to Prince Achbee to release funds than I would believe something they saw on Twitter in 2016 made them not want to vote that year.
Does Digital Sista, Nance, or any of these experts actually engage in black online spaces beyond following likes and retweets as engagement? Black Planet, BGOL, Black Voices, Okayplayer...I've used the black internet since the beginning and there's always been a vocal apolitical strain that resembles real-life. I've seen nothing to indicate anything has changed or that existing apolitical sentiments have been amplified by outsiders in any meaningful way that would sway a damn presidential election of all things. This has marginal impact in the worst case while other forms of voter suppression on the ground are actually more effective.
Did the Russians take a break in 2018 when black voter turnout increased?
Did negroes stop using social media that year?
The Russians will now (or once again like during the civil rights movement) be a handy excuse anytime black voter turn out dips. It will be another way to ignore or defuse black political apathy and whatever revolutionary or anti-establishment sentiments we may be expressing on the ground.
Anecdotally, can anyone find me at least a dozen or so black people that were legitimately influenced by that Russian gibberish messaging? You can find just about one Negro to say just about anything and go on television, yet I haven't seen one black person to date say they decided to not vote because of proven Russian bot activity.
The internet is not television where you are force-fed content. Older black voters who are the most reliable are voting regardless of whatever they see on Facebook and millennials tend to gravitate towards curated news and online spaces that emphasize their preexisting worldview on politics, voting, or whatever the fukk else.
I'm more liable to believe a random black person sent money to Prince Achbee to release funds than I would believe something they saw on Twitter in 2016 made them not want to vote that year.
Does Digital Sista, Nance, or any of these experts actually engage in black online spaces beyond following likes and retweets as engagement? Black Planet, BGOL, Black Voices, Okayplayer...I've used the black internet since the beginning and there's always been a vocal apolitical strain that resembles real-life. I've seen nothing to indicate anything has changed or that existing apolitical sentiments have been amplified by outsiders in any meaningful way that would sway a damn presidential election of all things. This has marginal impact in the worst case while other forms of voter suppression on the ground are actually more effective.
Did the Russians take a break in 2018 when black voter turnout increased?
Did negroes stop using social media that year?
The Russians will now (or once again like during the civil rights movement) be a handy excuse anytime black voter turn out dips. It will be another way to ignore or defuse black political apathy and whatever revolutionary or anti-establishment sentiments we may be expressing on the ground.
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It is a mystery
Tory Lanez Stan
Literally any voter block can be influenced with enough resources to work with and its even more straightforward if there is tension or a feeling of disenfranchisement.
Like @ORDER_66 said this info isn't unique to this situation or new at all.
If you think that propoganda wont work in the social media era you are mistaken breh.
It's not that it can't work in theory. Black people are not immune from advertising or propaganda. It's about the degree to which it will sway the black electorate, which is unarguably the most loyal voting bloc in this country. Black American millennials are also arguably the most sophisticated users of online social media and platforms like Twitter. I need to see numbers or even a case study that these bots or propaganda (much of which is poor and reads like google translate) had any significant impact on black minds.
Why are black people still being blamed for trump being elected?
Show me how russia influenced black people who overwhelmingly voted for hillary anyway??
Ill wait
Putin has to extend his term limits because he's terrified of being out of office
how quickly yall forget 
Imagine having such a low opinion of black people that you don't believe they're capable of making their own political decisions. It HAS to be Russians and propaganda because how DARE black folks not vote Democrat without question.
Neo. The Only. The One.
THE ONE
how quickly yall forget
Yep. Putin directly attacked black ppl in America.
I can't wait until he gets killed. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
If we're only so-called 13% of the population and half of us don't vote....
Someone help me understand
US elections are RARELY won in landslides. Also, Black america is NOTORIOUSLY vocal about political choice and leanings. For 12% of the population we take up a TON of headspace in the American consiousness. For good or ill.
Russia was not influential in any way with black people voting patterns in 2016 and 2020. These are the same people who said ADOS were Russian bots. 
GoAggieGo.
getting blitzed.
Influencers and popular podcasts fuel election disinformation among Black voters, report shows
The analysis identified core areas that, it says, represent the “most significant” drivers of spreading false and misleading narratives for millions of Black Americans.
www.nbcnews.com
Influencers and popular podcasts fuel election disinformation among Black voters, report shows
The analysis identified core areas that, it says, represent the “most significant” drivers of spreading false and misleading narratives for millions of Black Americans.
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Disinformation targets millions of Americans in Black online spaces
Get more newson
June 25, 2024, 4:00 PM EDT
By Marquise Francis
At least 40 million Americans may be regularly targeted and fed disinformation within Black online spaces by a host of sources across social media, fueling false information around the election, according to a new report published Tuesday.
Touted as the first deep dive into understanding disinformation targeting Black America, the report, published by Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization working to combat disinformation within the Black community, identified half a dozen core online networks “reaching or targeting” Black Americans online with false and misleading narratives.
Conservative commentators like Candace Owens are among the most influential distributors of false information, according to the report, followed by a variety of sources, such as platforms geared toward the Black manosphere, like the “Fresh and Fit” podcast. Some episodes of the show have outright challenged women’s intelligence and allowed guests to share false and harmful narratives without pushback.
The report identifies some platforms like the nationally syndicated radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” as a "gateway influencer” or an authentic online space that holds critical space for stemming the tide of disinformation. These platforms, however, are also often targets for “bad actors to introduce harmful narratives,” according to the report.
Three other effective sources of disinformation, the report notes, are extreme Black nativists and separatists, like Foundational Black Americans who don’t believe in the concept of pan-Africanism and have stressed that people who are not descendants of enslaved people should not speak for or on behalf of Black Americans, as well as health skeptics such as Rizza Islam, an activist and self-proclaimed intellectual extremist, who has said without evidence that childhood vaccines “destroy the brain chemistry” and lead to autism and other disabilities. According to the CDC, this is not true. None of the other individuals or platforms listed above responded to requests for comment.
The report also identified foreign actors “that seek to influence U.S. political discourse,” like the digital media company African Stream.
African Stream denied spreading misinformation, adding that they “present an authentically African perspective.”
“We have a vigorous fact-checking process, which means work is checked by three different trained journalists three times before posting on our platforms,” the Nairobi-based company said in a statement, describing their work as a “Pan-African digital media platform covering affairs concerning Africans at home and in the diaspora.”
Onyx Impact found those six sources collectively have a potential reach of nearly 41 million Americans, adding that each represents spaces where skepticism, anti-Black rhetoric and deception of truth run rampant. For context, that figure is equivalent to nearly every Black person in the country, according to the latest census data.
Over four months, a team of researchers for Onyx Impact identified 2,500 online accounts creating, sharing or amplifying disinformation to Black communities. The researchers also held seven national focus groups of Black audiences to understand how those narratives were showing up in offline spaces. The point of the effort was to gauge the impact of the information, said the founder of Onyx Impact, Esosa Osa, an alumnus of the voting rights group Fair Fight.
Constant repetition of false or misleading information, “no matter how kind of absurd that disinformation is,” said Osa, can be effective across audiences, regardless of income, education or class. “Disinformation works because the more times that we hear something, the more likely we are to believe that it is true,” she said.
Narratives with the highest reach and impact across the networks, the report says, include misleading narratives focused on promises that these networks say President Joe Biden has broken, civic engagement and issues that stoke division.
Earlier this year, for example, Owens tweeted without evidence that vaccines cause an “explosion” of childhood cancer. But experts, through data, have denied that any link exists. In another instance, Owens shared inaccurate information that the shooter that killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 was transgender, an assertion that was based on the wrong photos of the shooter.
Critics have also repeatedly slammed the popular gossip site The Shade Room for being a hub for disinformation, particularly on issues related to Biden. The outlet once reported about a Biden-backed program to distribute “crack pipes” to promote health equity. The site ran with an article by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. The post quickly went viral, and the White House called it “misleading and misinformed.” In reality, the program was harm-reduction program meant to reduce drug overdoses. The Shade Room corrected the information in a follow-up post and took the original post down, but for many, the misinformation had already spread further than the truth.
The Shade Room did not respond to a request for comment.
The report noted that “confronting the challenges created by misinformation” is “crucial to ensuring the health and stability of our democracy.”
When it is left unchecked, experts said, disinformation can have devastating effects on the most marginalized communities, including harming physical and mental health.
Timothy Welbeck, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for Anti-Racism at Temple University, said disinformation presented as fact has the “heightened ability” to influence Black communities’ decision-making in ways never before seen, particularly less than five months from a presidential election.
“It can either encourage [voter] apathy or potentially encourage people to vote differently than they would have already,” Welbeck said, noting that Americans’ biggest issues, from the economy to Israel’s war with Hamas to federal judicial appointments, will greatly be affected by who becomes president in November — in his eyes, a direct byproduct of how successful disinformation continues to spread.
Onyx Impact offered strategic guidance in the report to those combating disinformation to engage with those platforms by identifying trusted messengers and discrediting bad actors. While there is no evidence that African Americans are more susceptible to disinformation than any other ethnic group, Osa said, consistent targeting of any group has a way of breaking through.
“Black voters are likely less susceptible to many disinformation narratives given their deserved higher levels of skepticism in institutions and government overall,” she said, “but just like other communities, when disinformation is targeted and comes from messengers with standing, it can be incredibly effective and dangerous.”
Polling shows that disinformation remains a concern for most Americans.
A national survey published this month by the media reform group Free Press found that 79% of adults in the U.S. worry that what they read online includes “fake” or “false” information with the deliberate goal to “confuse.” The poll of 3,000 people across the U.S. also found that 76% of respondents are concerned that they were reading misleading information online about the presidential election. Black Americans, in particular, are also disproportionately more likely to get their news from social media, the Free Press survey found.
Osa said there is nothing new about increased disinformation and misinformation ahead of recent presidential elections. In 2016, Russia set out to interfere with the election by spreading propaganda on social media, hacking into campaigns and probing state voter databases, according to a Senate report. In 2020, there were coordinated efforts to deter Black voters from going to the polls more systematically, including conservative activists’ making more than a thousand fake robocalls to deter Detroit voters, who are overwhelmingly Black, from voting by mail.
Today, however, Osa said, the way disinformation is presented to a population with outsize political power and influence continues to be more sophisticated. Black Americans are projected to account for 14% of eligible voters in November and have a higher turnout rate than Latino voters, despite making up a lower share of the U.S. population.
Recent outreach to Black voters by Biden and former President Donald Trump is evidence of an emphasis on capturing the demographic.
The latest NBC News poll found that 2 in 3 Black voters ages 18 to 49 support Biden, as well as 88% of older Black voters.
Trump, meanwhile, has garnered support from 1 in 4 young Black voters ahead of this year’s election and 6% of older Black voters, according to the NBC News poll, in an election in which even minor changes in voting patterns in battleground states could decide the race.
By comparison, in 2020, no less than 78% of Black voters chose Biden, according to exit polling data.
But not all experts believe disinformation efforts have substantial influence now or will have it in the future.
Deen Freelon, a presidential professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in digital politics, remains hesitant about overstating how deep misinformation runs within the Black community.
“It is incredibly difficult to draw a straight line between any kind of communication … and the kinds of attitudinal and behavioral changes that people would like communication to have,” he said. “It’s just very hard to change people’s minds and their behavior in substantial ways from what they’re already doing.”
However, Freelon acknowledged that even a slight change in behavior could tip the race to Biden or Trump.
“The vast majority of people who consume [disinformation] is a small group of people, but in a close election, a small group of people can be sufficient to, at least potentially, sway the election one way or the other,” he said.
CORRECTION (June 26, 2024, 12:17 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misclassified The Breakfast Club, according to the report's criteria. The report classifies it as a “gateway influencer,” not as an outright distributor of false information.