Do yourself a favor, don’t become a Putin puppet

Russia on Wednesday vetoed a UN resolution intended to pinpoint who ordered the use of nerve gas in Syria.

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They’re betting they won’t be held accountable and that appears to be the whole point of this disinformation plan we keep hearing about.

The plan starts with false stories – like the ones that claim the Sandy Hook school shootings and the Boston marathon bombings were a hoax.

Researcher Kate Starbird of the University of Washington found that these stories are often spread by automated Twitter accounts called Twitterbots – robot accounts programmed to blindly retweet a story again and again under different names.

“You see them active in the conspiracy theory space, where one person will tweet about this event being a hoax and then hundreds of bots will automatically retweet it so it looks like there are hundreds of people engaging in it,” she said.

Guess who’s behind some of the websites you end up clicking on:

“There were some Russian propaganda sites and think-tanks within my data sets,” she said.

The people who plant these stories are betting that if the story fits your world view, you won’t bother to check it out before sharing it – which is the ultimate goal! People are more likely to believe propaganda if it comes from someone they actually know.

“Their idea is if that if people don’t know where to turn for information, if they don’t know what to believe, then they become very easy to manipulate,” she said.

That’s the greatest conspiracy of all – to get people to believe in conspiracies.

So it doesn’t take a relationship with Vladimir Putin to do Russia’s bidding! When you fall for a false story and spread it around, you are basically a Putin puppet — even if you haven’t met him and don’t know him personally and have no idea why that friend of yours was talking to Russian spies.

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