Did social media users in the United States—and mainstream media outlets—fall victim to an organized disinformation campaign over the weekend?
That disturbing idea is being raised by a cyber warfare expert who says she may have fallen victim to the scheme herself.
It was nearly impossible to miss this viral video billed as a confrontation between MAGA hat-wearing students from Covington Catholic School in Kentucky and a Native American war veteran.
The video exploded on social media and into every mainstream newsroom website and newscast around the country—and many parts of the world.
While the debate continues about what exactly happened here, a disturbing question lingers: How did this short video spread so far, so fast?
It could have been cyber warfare.
CNN's latest update on the story puts it like this:
Twitter suspends a mystery account that amplified the viral video
In doing its story, CNN noticed something else unusual about the viral video. It was posted by a real person, yes, but a highly questionable Twitter account was doing an incredible job of spreading it. That account claimed to be a teacher in California but had the profile picture of a blogger from Brazil.
The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. "Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020," its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.
Twitter suspended that account after CNN asked about it. Something was clearly amiss.
Did Russia amplify the viral video?
At this point, it appears a suspicious Twitter account helped get the train out of the station on this story, and an "anonymous network" of Twitter accounts pushed it down the tracks to the rest of us, where we retweeted and shared it with the world.
Who or what would do such a thing? Russia must be an odds on favorite here.
One of the interesting things about that questionable Twitter account, in this case, is that it certainly follows the pattern Russian-backed accounts utilized during the 2016 presidential election.
In case you don't watch the brief video, here is what he told me about Russia:
"They have goals that are, arguably, to keep us in a political churn. That's an advantage to them if we're going to focus internally... and to take advantage, frankly, that we have a public a large proportion of which get their news off social media."
And that's exactly what happened in this case over the weekend, regardless of what you think of the incident.
It was an all-out social media assault on our own: Americans hating on Americans over politics, religion, race, gender, and class.
While we don't know (yet) if Russia was behind this viral topic spreading like wildfire, if they were, then it was cyber warfare mission accomplished.