Shuttered Facebook group that organized anti-Clinton, anti-immigrant rallies across Texas was linked to Russia

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-group-russia-texas-anti-immigrant-rallies-2017-9?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202

Natasha Bertrand
Sep. 13, 2017

A Russia-linked Facebook group attempted to organize a series of anti-immigrant, anti-Hillary Clinton rallies across Texas last November, three days before the election and months after Russian operatives used the social-media platform to organize an anti-refugee-resettlement protest in rural Idaho.

A Russia-linked Facebook group attempted to organize a series of anti-immigrant, anti-Hillary Clinton rallies across Texas last November, three days before the election and months after Russian operatives used the social-media platform to organize an anti-refugee-resettlement protest in rural Idaho.

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In late October, however, the group transformed from a nativist, anti-Clinton meme machine to an organizing force when it created a Facebook event for a "Texit statewide rally" titled "Get ready to secede!"

The event has since been removed from Facebook

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The event called on Texans in major cities like Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Austin to protest "establishment robbers" and "higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens." It further claimed that a "Killary Rotten Clinton" victory would lead to an influx of "refugees, mosques, and terrorist attacks."

The page also created "an approximate map" for the rallies and explained, in awkward English, "what will be happening" at the event.

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It is unclear how many people showed up to the protests. The group's efforts came on the heels of a similar Russian effort disclosed by The Daily Beast earlier this week: an anti-Muslim protest in Twin Falls, Idaho, titled "Citizens before refugees."

The group that organized the protest, which called itself SecuredBorders, was also shut down as part of Facebook's purge of Russia-linked pages. It had roughly 100,000 fewer followers than Heart of Texas when it was shuttered. SecuredBorders and Heart of Texas both linked refugees to crime and posted Islamophobic memes and photos.

"A lot of different people are working on the Russian active-measures problem from a lot of different directions, and they all consistently find examples of the same general content being promoted: highly divisive anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric and activity," said JM Berger, an expert on extremism and influence operations who helped build a digital platform called Hamilton 68 that tracks Russian propaganda in real time.

"At this point, we have a lot of independent sources pointing to the same conclusion," Berger said.

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"The use of anti-refugee themes as part of this effort is also another example of the Kremlin's use of divisive issues to attempt to pit Americans against one another," said Rosenberger, who is also involved in the Hamilton 68 tracking project.

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