Ghana and Nigeria are reportedly being used by Russian trolls to meddle in the 2020 Presidential Elections of the United States (U.S) .
The US is scheduled to go to polls in November this year.
But like 2016, CNN has reported the Russian trolls are back.
According to a report on Friday, CNN noted that once again, the Russian trolls are “trying to poison the political atmosphere in the United States ahead of this year’s elections.”
It says, however, that this time the trolls “are better disguised and more targeted, harder to identify and track. And they have found an unlikely home, far from Russia itself.”
In 2016, much of the trolling aimed at the US election operated from an office block in St. Petersburg, Russia, CNN reported.
CNN stated that its months-long investigation has discovered that, in this election cycle, at least part of the campaign has been outsourced — to trolls in the west African nations of Ghana and Nigeria.
“They have focused almost exclusively on racial issues in the US, promoting black empowerment and often displaying anger towards white Americans. The goal, according to experts who follow Russian disinformation campaigns, is to inflame divisions among Americans and provoke social unrest,” it added.
According to CNN, the language and images used in the posts — on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — are sometimes graphic.
“One of the Ghanaian trolls — @africamustwake — linked to a story from a left-wing conspiracy website and commented on Facebook: “America’s descent into a fascist police state continues.”
“Referring to a Republican state senator, the post continued: “Someone needs to take that Senator out,” according to CNN.
Total Accounts
CNN reports that over 200 accounts were created by the Ghanaian trolls — the vast majority in the second half of 2019 — and they reached hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people worldwide.
“Facebook and Twitter had already been looking into some of the troll accounts when CNN notified the two companies of our investigation,” it said.
Facebook Assessment
It added that “in a statement Thursday, Facebook said that its “subsequent assessment benefited from our collaboration with a team of journalists at CNN” and it had “removed 49 Facebook accounts, 69 Pages and 85 Instagram accounts for engaging in foreign interference.”
“Facebook says that about 13,200 Facebook accounts followed one or more of the Ghana accounts and around 263,200 people followed one or more of Instagram accounts, about 65% of whom were in the US,” it added.
It added that “the activity uncovered by CNN had striking similarities to the Russian troll campaign of 2016, which created hundreds of accounts designed to pass as American. @africamustwake, for example, which described itself as a “Platform For #BLM #Racism #PoliceBrutality,” claimed to be in Florida.
Other accounts, for example, claimed to be in Brooklyn or New Orleans, it said.
Operations
CNN said it worked with two Clemson University professors — Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren — in tracking the Ghanaian operation.
” Linvill said the campaign was straight out of the Russian playbook, trying to mask its efforts among groups in the US.”
“They were very closely engaged in the Black Lives Matter community,” he said. “They talked almost exclusively about what was happening on the streets of the United States and not on the streets of Africa,” it stated.
BY Melvin Tarlue