This past week, Parkland, Florida, turned into the latest front in the national epidemic of gun violence, when an expelled student returned to their former school and opened fire, killing 17 people and wounding many more.
Records for the worst mass shootings in American history have been broken repeatedly in recent years, with incidents ranging from the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting to the Las Vegas shooting to the Parkland shooting. Just since January 1 of this year, over 350 Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 have been injured or killed in incidents of gun violence.
America, then, has an obvious serious gun violence problem.
This problem has now given Russian propaganda bots on Twitter another springboard from which to go after vulnerable Americans online. In the aftermath of Russian influence efforts in the 2016 presidential election, such online propaganda efforts have maintained a higher profile than before, although the president continually denies the significance of the problem.
Even if the president denies the existence of the problem, it remains, and Wired now has a new report about Russian online propagandists having seized on the Parkland school shooting as yet another way to push their agenda.
Although the propaganda bots ultimately have more ground to cover than just the Parkland shooting, on Thursday, Wired reported on the finding of online monitoring group Hamilton 68 that among the top links being shared by Kremlin bots was a 2014 POLITIFACT article questioning how many school shootings had truly taken place since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
That article, of course, is a curiously specific but potent tool in the battle of wits that’s played out over and over again between gun control opponents and supporters in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting.
That “battle of wits” is what the Russian propagandists are interested in furthering. Somewhat like the case of Russians starting out with being against Hillary Clinton above being for any particular candidate, their point isn’t to further one particular side of the debate as much as it is to try and turn the debate itself more intense and hostile.
Besides the POLITIFACT link, Hamilton 68 also reported Thursday that one of the top links being shared by Kremlin bots covered the Parkland shooter’s disturbing past, including as expressed through his past Instagram posts.
Highlighting the shooter’s alleged mental instability is one strategy available for those attempting to make it seem as though gun control couldn’t have stopped the shooting from happening. After all, they argue, if the problem was his mental instability, then what would gun control have done to stop him from lashing out?
This is the line that’s been trumpeted by the president, with him having tweeted a message to that effect recently.
In addition to the anti-gun control links, Russian propaganda bots also used pro-gun control hashtags, but analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy — the organization behind Hamilton 68 — Bret Schafer suspects that in addition to the possible purpose of just fostering discord, those behind the bots were using the hashtags sarcastically.
Through all of this, as Russian propaganda bots seize on our internal discord to try and make even more of it, the president has yet to do anything to impose any common sense gun control and put a possible end to the discord.
On Friday, he confirmed on Twitter that he would be visiting the Parkland community in the meantime.
Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
