Russian bots reportedly pushed a Thanksgiving food poisoning hoax on Twitter as practice for influencing the 2016 election
Grigory Dukor/AP
- Russian trolls reportedly spread a fake news story about a batch of Walmart Thanksgiving turkeys giving people severe food poisoning in November 2015.
- The hoax went deep, and included the registration of a fake website that then wrote a compelling news story about the nonexistent outbreak.
- The campaign may have been a trial run for Russian social media interference in the 2016 election.
- Russian troll activity directed towards US social media users dates back to May 2014.
On Thanksgiving 2015, a woman in New York City named Alice Norton wrote on a cooking forum that her entire family had been rushed to the hospital with severe cases of food poisoning after eating turkey purchased from Walmart.
Over the next few hours, numerous accounts on Twitter and Tumblr made similar claims, and soon enough, a news story appeared that claimed 200 people had been sent to the hospital in "critical" condition. Wikipedia articles were created about the incident.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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