The Telegraph have an item (HERE) about a Russian troll factory using fake Twitter accounts to stir up social divisions in the USA in 2015. A medical researcher accidentally stumbled across Twitter users who were tweeting about how effective (and later from the same users, how ineffective) vaccines were in tackling disease. Apparently, the Russians had discovered that vaccination was a subject that provoked argument, there was no intention to engage about the efficacy or otherwise of vaccines, only to create divisions in American society by whatever means they could.
On the surface this has little to do with Brexit and The Telegraph makes no link, but if Russia wanted to exacerbate divisions in a western country as the article suggests, what better subject is there than Britain's sometimes awkward relationship with the EU?
It seems a perfect, ready made issue with the added strategic benefit to Putin that if Brexit succeeded it would split off one of Europe's biggest economies from the EU. Even if it failed it would have left a legacy of bitter division. For Putin it was a win win situation. Stir up division and bring the break up of the EU a little nearer.
Aaron Banks has been linked to the Russian Ambassador and investments in Russia and I'm not sure we know even now where the money came from to fund Bank's campaign against EU membership. Yet The Telegraph doesn't make a connection to Brexit at all. It does say:
It directly implicates Russia in the targeting of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and is totally silent on Brexit. In fact the article doesn't actually mention Britain or Brexit once.
Helpfully the writer explains what trolls are (Telegraph readers aren't that savvy) and what their objective was:
"'Trolls’, people who deliberately start arguments online and throw vile abuse around, are a feature of the internet as widespread as they are widely deplored. Some pick fights just for the sheer hell of it. At Savushkina Street [the HQ of the troll factory in St Petersburg], however, the aim was nothing less than bringing down the US political system from within, starting fights and sowing discord that would turn American citizen upon American citizen".
If the article is true, and I think it is, I would be utterly amazed if Russia was not in some way engage with the Leave campaign (or even both campaigns) in 2016. They were prepared to become involved with something of more modest importance (vaccines) and of supreme importance (the US Presidential election) but apparently not Brexit. Does that seem logical? No, I don't think so either.
