How the take down of Al Franken was orchestrated by the Right Wing and supported by Russian Twitter bots.

Courtesy of Newsweek:

While everyone has been focused on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump, the Franken take-down originated in—and was propelled by—a strategic online campaign with digital tentacles reaching to, of all places, Japan. Analysts have now mapped out how the initial accusation against Franken by Hooters pinup girl and lad-mag model Leeann Tweeden was turned into effective propaganda after first being hinted at by right wing black ops master Roger Stone.

A pair of Japan-based websites, created the day before Tweeden came forward, and a swarm of related Twitter bots made the Tweeden story go viral—and then weaponized a liberal writer's criticism of Franken. The bot army, in tandem with prominent real live human right-wingers with Twitter followers in the millions, such as Mike Cernovich, spewed thousands of posts, helping the #frankenfondles hashtag and the "Franken is a groper" meme effectively silence the testimonies of eight former female staffers who defended the Minnesota Democrat before he resigned last year. 

The operation commenced on November 15, when Roger Stone— who is now banned from Twitter for racism and profanity—tweeted from one of his accounts “Roger Stone says it’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the barrel.’ Franken next in long list of Democrats accused of ‘grabby’ behavior.” 

On the same day, a web domain called realusa.site was registered in Japan by a developer named Atsufumi Otsuka. A fake-news website was then established at that web address, and then a second one was created a few days later, according to research shared with the voting rights research outfit Unhack the Vote. 

Tweeden’s account of being groped by Franken was first amplified by a network of right wing media, including KABC in Los Angeles, where Tweeden has a radio show, The Hill, Infowars and Breitbart, which mobilized within hours of Stone's tweet and the release of a picture of a Tweeden and Franken clowning around at a USO performance before he was a senator.

By November 17, the trending of “Al Franken” was officially also a Russia Intelligence operation, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an organization tracking Russian social media accounts, based on a sample taken that day of 600 of the fake accounts.

There is apparently a sophisticated botnet called "The Voty botnet" that was instrumental in pushing a story by a liberal writer called “Dear Al Franken, I’ll Miss You But You Can’t Matter Anymore” out to millions of people.

That article provided legitimacy for actual liberals to pile on Al Franken as well, and before you knew it Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand were calling for his resignation. 

The rest, as they say, is history. 

And this serves as yet another reminder that it is not only the Right Wing who can be manipulated by Russian tactics online, but also seemingly intelligent liberals.

We have to examine literally every bit of information we see to discover its roots, and to determine if it is indeed accurate, before we accept it as fact.

This puts a huge burden on each of us, but right now this is essentially our only defense against allowing ourselves to be used to spread and weaponize misinformation.