Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 02:10 pm
The Russians targeted supporters of Bernie Sanders with a social media campaign that was designed to help Donald Trump win.
Many thousands of other tweets, with no direct reference to Sanders, were also designed to appeal to his backers, urging them to do anything but vote for Clinton in the general election.
“I think there is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton,” said one of the Clemson researchers, Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications. The tweets examined in the new analysis “give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought.”
The conventional wisdom that the Russians targeted Trump supporters in key swing states, while that is true, the Russian operation was bigger and more sophisticated than was previously realized.
The Russians would have used the supporters of any second finisher in the Democratic primary to divide the party. Their operation wasn’t so much about Bernie Sanders, but weakening the Democratic Party so that Trump could win. The Russians continue to look for any weakness in Democratic unity as they try to split the party because Donald Trump can’t win against a united Democratic Party.
It is early in the 2020 cycle, but there have been no public attacks from candidates on each other, and interestingly none of the Democrats are making their campaigns about attacking Trump.
There is a real debate of ideas happening in the early Democratic field, but the Russians are constantly looking for an opening to divide Democrats, and they will use the same tactics to try to weaken Democrats in 2020, which is why it is vital for Democrats to keep their eyes on the main goal of defeating Trump in 2020.
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