Yall i just got an email from tumblr saying I interacted with accounts made by the IRA …… is this even real????
The internet is wild
Im literally imagining some government worker in russia logging onto tumblr.edu and thinking to themselves “better change my url to ‘black-galaxy-magic’ to stay young n hip and relevant with the youth of america”
sooooo let’s break it down then because the fact that tumblr sent this email is mega important
if yall haven’t been living under a rock for the last year and a half, you may have heard that trump won the election. and you may have also heard that trump was helped out by russia in a ton of ways. one of those ways was by the russian troll farm, the internet research agency (IRA). there were 84 accounts on tumblr spreading anti-hillary propaganda and general discontent, mainly targeting POC and “socially aware” youth. some of those accounts were HUGELY influential, “4mysquad” being one of the top ones with tons of followers and popular posts.
a lot of them started with relatively innocent, pro-POC posts to gain a following, before moving on to anti-police, anti-hillary, and general anti-establishment to create distrust in the only major-party candidate against trump. like I said, many of the accounts were hugely influential so their posts spread FAR. all that visibility led to increased voter apathy, meaning less voter turnout and fewer people voting against trump. and tumblr was silent on this after the official indictment of the IRA, until literally just yesterday.
so to sum up, the email you and a ton of other people got is saying that you were following and sharing posts from russian pro-trump propaganda blogs. i’d ask that you PLEASE reblog this, because it’s super important that everyone who got this email knows why they got it, knows what it means, and hopefully knows what they might be able to do better in the future
Yes, this is four years old, but as someone who’s been on Tumblr way too long I dug this up as a reminder that no, even this hellsite isn’t beneath this kind of active sabotage.
Even with everything we’ve put up with for the past four years, it looks like the same tricks are still working. Please vote blue, US followers. The only reason not to is to keep Trump in power, and there are people out there actively trying to enforce that.
Reblogging this again Dec 2021 as a reminder, because ive seen a LOT of posts recently about how tumblr is safe, tumblr is inhospitable to unwanted groups, tumblr is better than the rest. Which, yeah, tumblr is great and all, but please, PLEASE remember the disinformation that happened here. It happened before, it can happen again. Don’t trust posts or blogs blindly.
Thanks for bringing this back because I keep coming across posts and blogs that look super suspicious to me in how they spam you with horror news and then make a point about how ALL politicians are bad, and how democratic governments are just as bad as autocratic, totalitarian and terrorist regimes. Not to mention blogs that glorify terrorist leaders and autocratic states….
Also, I remember that I made a “please vote blue” post before the election in 2020 that got a few thousand reblogs, and suddenly I got tons of anonymous asks. Turned out my post had been linked in a Russian troll forum whose members were sending me hate mail.
Be careful out there. There are many many people (and countries/organizations) who know that the leftist, hyper-empathic audience of Tumblr is an easy target for misinformation.
Never knew about this nor did I get this email way back when but it's very important this is still spread
