A registered foreign agent of Russia has repeatedly paid a right-wing influencer account to post memes and even promote a bogus voting fraud hoax, according to a report. (Photo credit: JRdes / Shutterstock) A registered foreign agent of Russia has repeatedly paid a right-wing influencer account to post memes and even promote a bogus voting fraud hoax, according to a report.
Simeon Boikov, a podcaster known online as “AussieCossack," paid the person behind the X account @Alphafox78 $100 a piece for about 10 posts, CNN reported Monday night. The account has about 650,000 followers and CNN obtained documents showing Boikov is a registered foreign agent for Russia in Australia.
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“Earlier today, our office became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia ID’s claiming to have voted multiple times,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement Thursday. “This is false, and is an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen this election.”
Raffensperger said the video was created and distributed by Russian influencers.
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The man deleted the post after it was viewed more than half a million times.
The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren’t making anyone racist, they’re just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, “yeah, if you’re in this town after sundown and you’re not white, we’re gonna hang you” (which it’s important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).
Since they can’t do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of “justice” (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren’t there, they just make them up.