Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman” and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim”.

That’s according to Williams and Kalvin, two “Atlanta-based” vloggers and wannabe rappers whose “social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics,” reports The Daily Beast.

Across four prominent social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube – the duo claimed to offer a “word of truth” to African-American audiences:

“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.”

Well, in August this year, their content was removed from Facebook after it was “identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account”.

Twitter also took action, but their YouTube account remains active:

While the videos only racked up hundreds of views on YouTube at press time, some Williams and Kalvin videos on Facebook reached thousands of people. Before the account was shuttered, Williams and Kalvin’s Facebook page had 48,000 fans.

In one video, below, the host refers to Hillary Clinton as an “old racist bitch”:

“She’s a fucking racist. And this woman is a witch,” he says as a picture portrays Clinton in Wizard of Oz attire. He goes on to praise Julian Assange for releasing hacked emails.

“This woman, she’s sick on her head.”

Take a look for yourself:

Discovery of this tactic shows that Russia went beyond simply adopting memes and hijacking hashtags to sway influence, instead choosing to use real people to push an agenda:

The discovery of living, breathing, real-life avatars for Kremlin talking points deepens and complicates the emerging picture of how Russian propaganda reached what Facebook alone estimated last week were 10 million users in the United States—a number considered by many outside experts to be a lowball estimate.

Clint Watts, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberattacks, explained how third party contractors from “both inside Russia and countries with cheap labor is a method used by the Kremlin to muddy the waters on attribution of propaganda”.

“Often, (the Kremlin) will contract out entities to do this so they can say, ‘You can’t prove that it’s us,’” Watts told The Daily Beast. “It’s pretty routine for them to try to gain resources through third parties and contract cutouts.”

It really is amazing what money will buy.

[source:thedailybeast]