The Washington Post has accused US digital activists of being “Russian trolls” and got them banned from social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook.
What’s more, during the entirety of the report, there wasn’t any proof provided to validate their claims of the conservative digital activists’ accounts being “Russian trolls.”
Surprisingly, all that the Post had to do was reach out to the big tech social media platforms and they immediately complied. This follows many recent stories of users having their accounts shut down when they’re caught in the crossfire of various accusations.
The activists that have lost their accounts worked for a company that deploys digital activists for conservative causes, known as Rally Forge.
“Comparing American conservative teenagers to Russian bots is, in and of itself, the height of misinformation by the mainstream media. They should be ashamed. It’s beyond ridiculous at this point,” said Students for Trump, the organization that had hired Rally Forge for its causes, Breitbart reported.
The activists who were suspended from social media platforms due to the article revealed that the Post had gotten several facts wrong, or rather, questioned why it chose to portray the wrong facts.
“I don’t know why they put that article there. They totally misrepresented my dad. There was another point where they talked about not being paid minimum wage. That is not true — we are being paid minimum wage. I don’t know why that was in there,” said Paige Noonan, one of the activists banned from social media because of The Washington Post.
The activists have also expressed that that their freedom of speech was being curtailed and they were being censored.
“There is nothing more American than standing up for what you believe and making your voice heard which is exactly what these activists were doing. The Washington Post’s laughable characterization of these grassroots activists’ online commentary is misinformation designed to further undermine the voice of everyday Americans in this election,” said Jake Hoffman, the CEO of Rally Forge.
The report also goes on to make other claims, such as suggesting that paying people for repeating political messages as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” something that is common across many political campaigns.
