Radar Online
Donald Trump Jr. was the victim of Russian trolls who created a fake Kid Rock social media account in an effort to meddle in the United States’ elections, RadarOnline.com has learned.
The development comes following a newly published report by the social media tracking firm Graphika and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory.
The report found that at least 35 separate accounts controlled by Russian trolls were active across popular right-wing social media apps like Gab, Gettr and Truth Social.
Although platforms like Gab and Gettr were previously found hosting “Russian influence operations,” Graphika and Stanford’s findings mark the first time Russian-linked accounts were active on Truth Social – the social media outlet owned by ex-President Donald Trump.
Also surprising were the Russian trolls’ penchant for impersonating the American musician and outspoken MAGA supporter Kid Rock.
In one instance, ex-President Trump’s son, Don Jr., was caught screenshotting and sharing a post from the fake Kid Rock account KidRockOfficial.
“Yup,” Don Jr. posted to Instagram earlier this year alongside a screenshot of a conspiracy theory meme about high gas prices and the alleged Covid-19 cure Ivermectin. The meme was lifted directly from the fake account KidRockOfficial.
The Russian trolls also created fake accounts to help push for the failed Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attack Democratic Senate candidates like Raphael Warnock and John Fetterman, and push conspiracy theories about Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and the now defunct and bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
“The tactics are exactly what we’ve come to expect from these actors since 2016,” Tyler Williams, director of investigations at Graphika, told Rolling Stone on Tuesday. “They use fake personas to imitate, infiltrate, and attempt to influence a specific online community.”
“These personas then coordinate across multiple platforms to amplify division and exacerbate existing tensions,” Williams explained further. “This is precisely the behavior that gets them caught on Facebook and YouTube, but on alt-tech platforms they appear to enjoy relatively free rein.”
Graphika and Stanford researchers were successfully able to track the phony social media accounts back to the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens – a fake media company used as the basis for Russia’s online troll factory.
Although the 35 identified fake accounts only garnered an average of 33,000 new followers in their imitation operation, the accounts impersonating Kid Rock reportedly performed the best and received the most successful results – particularly after Don Jr. shared the one fake account with his six million Instagram followers.
