Burning Bible part of disinformation campaign

WASHINGTON» For some of President Donald Trump’s loudest cheerleaders, it was a story too good to check out: Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland, Ore., had burned a stack of Bibles, and then topped off the fire with American flags. There was even a video to prove it.

The story fit a central Trump campaign talking point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing earlier this month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying that the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.”

The truth was more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.

Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bibleburning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.

With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the vote appear to be well underway. U.S. intelligence officials said last week that Russia was using a range of techniques to denigrate Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden. And late last month, intelligence officials briefed Congress on Russian efforts — both covert and overt — to stoke anger over the nationwide racial-justice protests.

Russian officials have aggressively sought to refute the allegations. But U.S. officials are growing increasingly confident in their assessment and say the Russian tactics are evolving. Moscow, they say, has shifted away from the fake social media accounts and bots used by the Internet Research Agency and other groups to amplify false articles before the 2016 vote. Instead, the Russians are relying increasingly on English-language news sites to push out incendiary stories that can be picked up and spread by Americans, many of whom have proved as eager as foreign powers to stoke partisan divisions inside the United States.

The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering. Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured.

Some of the news outlets used by Russia are well known, such as RT, the Kremlin-financed operation whose video news agency, Ruptly, put out the video of the Bible burning. Others are more obscure.

Some stories are tailored to appeal to conservatives, others to an audience that might be best described as the alt-left.

Some of the stories spread by the Russian news outlets are outright fictions. But the most useful ones — the ones most likely to go viral — are those with a kernel of truth, such as the tale of Bible burnings in Portland.

The video on which the story is based came from Ruptly, which regularly streams a live feed from the protests for a few hours each night and then clips together a short video of highlights. The livestream and the clip later edited down by Ruptly shows at least one Bible burning after midnight on Aug. 1, as some protesters were trying to build a fire, but the scene looks and sounds as if it is far from the main action of the protest.

Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests.

The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night.

Ruptly then let Twitter take it from there.

The video was first tweeted by an account that lists two cities — Oklahoma City and Abu Dhabi — as its users’ location and has only a few dozen followers. It was soon after deleted. But before it disappeared, the tweet was picked up by a Malaysian named Ian Miles Cheong, who has amassed a large Twitter following by playing a right-wing American raconteur on social media.

His tweet quickly became the basis for an entire day of outrage from right-wing news outlets, Republican political figures and altright commentators.

It has since been retweeted more than 26,000 times.