RUSSIAN TENTACLES INTO TENNESSEE

The Russian influence in the 2016 election even reached into Tennessee, a report in Russian media detailed last week.

But Twitter, the social media platform on which a fake account was created, didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get rid of it.

Once it learned about the account, @TEN_GOP, created in late 2015, the Tennessee Republican Party, whose Twitter page is @TNGOP, tried to quash it.

Not once, not twice, but three times. The account finally was suspended in August.

We don’t want to think left-leaning Twitter was in league with Russian operatives to make the state GOP party look bad, but so many fake charges have been thrown around for political reasons about Russian influence in the 2016 election that it’s hard to know what to believe.

In any case, Russian business magazine RBC wrote that the account was created by a Russian “troll farm” that existed to influence U.S. political views. The account, which featured the state seal and a Tennessee location, frequently tweeted racist items, occasionally used anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim posts, and at one point included the Confederate battle flag as part of its official image.

Its posts were shared by careless Tennessee politicians who didn’t read the Twitter handle carefully and others outside the state, including conservative pundit Ann Coulter. It wound up with more than 10 times the followers as the official state party, 150,000 as compared to 13,000.

“It’s a shame how quickly people fell into that trap,” Brent Leatherwood, the former state GOP executive director, told the Nashville Tennessean.

When Twitter finally suspended the post, the state party having gotten nowhere with the social media site, the Tennessee GOP was talking with the national Republican Party about how to get it closed down.

Whether it was the Russians’ plan for the party to seem to be something it wasn’t, and appeal to others who might be that same “something,” or to be seen to be something it wasn’t to look bad to those who might consider the party and its platforms is unknown.

Either way, it lends credence to the influence Russia tried to wield in the election, an influence that some still don’t believe occurred.

As for Twitter, it seems no less vulnerable to such influence as Facebook. Twitter recently disclosed it had found around 200 accounts linked to Russian groups, groups that had bought $100,000 in ads on Facebook for election influence.

But why the social media site refused to do anything about such influence, once confronted with the truth by the state party, is just as concerning.