How Russia Uses Facebook To Lure Americans To Political Rallies
(HuffPost) 04/30/2019 06:00 am ET Updated 2 hours ago
A women’s rights group attended a volatile protest in NYC. A year later, they found out the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency was behind it all.
NEW YORK ― On a Saturday evening in the fall of 2017, local activist Amy Bettys schlepped to Union Square in Manhattan, alongside members of the women’s reproductive rights group she works with, to protest a proposed federal restriction on abortion. She and her group, Women’s Health & Reproductive Rights (WHARR), were attending an event they’d seen posted online, co-sponsored by the local Women’s March Alliance and an organization called the Resisters, which touted itself as being dedicated to “feminist activism against fascism.” It seemed like a good opportunity for WHARR at the time: Here was an event to promote women’s reproductive rights, held on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares and co-sponsored by a legitimate feminist enterprise in the WMA.
Oddly, nobody from the WMA or the Resisters showed up. Instead, Bettys and other activists arrived only to be surrounded by a handful of counterprotesters wearing red “Make America great again” caps and holding a pro-Donald Trump flag.
“They showed up within the first 10 minutes and had this very professional Trump banner and a camera crew in tow,” Bettys told HuffPost. “They were shouting at us and trying to antagonize us. We tried to chant over them without engaging them. We were there to protest a piece of legislation, and they were there for us.”
It was weird that Trump supporters with no clear agenda had shown up to agitate a relatively small event, and weirder still that the Resisters, who had organized the protest, didn’t show up at all.
“Turns out, the whole thing was a setup,” Bettys said. “The Resisters were Russians.”
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FBI Director Christopher Wray said last week that Russian interference isn’t only a reality for the 2020 election, it’s “pretty much a 365-days-a-year threat” since 2016.
“On the one hand, I think enormous strides have been made since 2016 by all the different federal agencies, state and local election officials, the social media companies, et cetera,” he said, according to NPR. “But I think we recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game. And so we’re very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.”
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