https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html
"Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick.
The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s
March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all
expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed
up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.
More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts
later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the
nation’s history.
But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that
Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an
activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback,
but this was of a different magnitude. A question began to form in her mind: Do
they really hate me that much?
That morning, there were things going on that Ms. Sarsour could not imagine.
More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had
assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St.
Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations,
copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s
March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.
They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who
felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one
message performed better with audiences than any other.
It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have
seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian
American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim."
Via Brad Koehn and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
