Bethania Palma 21 // September 2017 // Trolls, Bots, 'Useful Idiots' Attack New Committee Aimed at Exposing Russian Propaganda Campaigns

10.7.18

Trolls, Bots, 'Useful Idiots' Attack New Committee Aimed at Exposing Russian Propaganda Campaigns: (Seagal, while perhaps most famous for starring in 1992’s Under Siege, has in recent years occupied himself with making a string of low-budget, direct-to-video action movies — and with building a friendship with President Vladimir Putin, who offered him Russian citizenship in November 2016.)

The way the attack on CIR spread was not unlike the way the Russian government helps boost other narratives it finds favorable to its own interests, such as the debunked Seth Rich conspiracy theory that posited Rich, a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer, had provided document-dumping site WikiLeaks with thousands of stolen DNC emails.

As with the Rich story, the message attacking CIR was amplified with a network of Kremlin-funded news outlets, social media bots, trolls, and “useful idiots”. State-funded news outlets like Tass and RT slammed Freeman for starring in the video. Through Tass, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov mockingly diagnosed Freeman with “emotional strain”: