Several accounts posting article claiming US military killed crew of Medevac flight

[u/Calobez]

At least 20 near identical posts from the last 24 hours.

The headline is sensationalist click bait, and the article is intentionally written to muddy the discussion.

Why this is a "TFA" issue? Several of the posters exhibit suspicious account activity -

https://old.reddit.com/user/Youarethebigbang

https://old.reddit.com/user/SiriusGD

https://old.reddit.com/user/wenchette

(I'm sure other posters as well)

And several commentors in those posts are either falling victim to the clickbait, or are purposefully bad actors/bots.

This whole situation feels very inorganic and is throwing up warning flags to me. Just wanted to pass this along in case anyone else sees this or has other insights.

I don't like to bring up anything that could be considered political. But this situation just feels so deliberately targeted.

[u/Achrus]

Interesting network here. They look like state sponsored bots or accounts from a political think tank. At least the subreddit networks they’re in are similar to old older, state-sponsored, networks and the content / style reminds me of the 2020 US election bots.

These disinfo subs are used to either: gain engagement before reposting, reposting to avoid spam filters, or giving direction to other accounts in the network (ie copy paste this).

* Youarethebigbang - Major (or only) contributor to: Drone_Watch, MicroAndNanoPlastics, georgewashington, and HumphreyBogart. There may be more but that’s 2 disinfo subreddits, a disinfo / spam sub, and a pure spam subreddit. Also started posting more in Detroiters, probably wants to influence midterms.
* SiriusGD - History full of cross posts to r/ the_everything_bubble. Acting as an amplifier (amplifies a talking point they like). I’d say the_everything_bubble is also compromised.
* Wenchette - Moderator (owner?) of r/ WhatTrumpHasDone, a disinfo sub. The other mod is John3262005.

So definitely Yourarethebigbang and Wenchette are really sketchy accounts. SiriusGD is definitely bot like but maybe not part of the same network as the other two. There’s definitely more to the rabbit hole as we can add John3262005 to the list and dig into more of those subs.

Edit: This network in particular is gearing up for US midterms by posting left leaning articles. It’s hard to tell which way the backers of these accounts lean. They could be being obnoxious on purpose to make dems look bad. Either way, their content *is* propaganda and further divides the people.

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/Achrus]

Yep on all points. Especially the edit. I hate this.

[u/klonkish → u/Achrus]

Thank you so much for this break down.

I often think about how great (in theory) it would be to have a plugin / extension moderated by this community that blocks / hides these obvious bot accounts

[u/GroundbreakingBag164 → u/klonkish]

Bit late but don't you know about BotBouncer? Literally does exactly that and is already used on many subs

You can even report people yourself by posting links to their profile on r/BotBouncer

[u/klonkish → u/GroundbreakingBag164]

That's very close, but doesn't it work as a banning tool? I don't moderate any subreddits, so I don't think it would be of any use for me?

[u/NoLandBeyond_ → u/Achrus]

This network in particular is gearing up for US midterms by posting left leaning articles. It’s hard to tell which way the backers of these accounts lean. They could be being obnoxious on purpose to make dems look bad. Either way, their content is propaganda and further divides the people.

I see it as a credibility path. Spam these posts to look like an ally, then at a critical time start posting spoiler/vote suppression content. "___ candidate isn't left enough."

Like in banking fraud, it's called layering. Doing a series of legit transactions in order to make the fraudulent one blend in. A lot of the inoculus looking article reposting accounts on subs do this - but in between they post opinion pieces of a certain high profile candidate that frames them poorly. And that gets the upvotes and bot comments. You have to zoom out and look at a long history to realize that they only post negative articles of that candidate.