Just before 9:30 am. on nov 20 the first reddit comments appeared- telling users that they believed Joe biden would be a "good and moderate president" and that they "hope he succeeded".
In the next 48 hours- 1819 people- seemingly infatuated with bidens statements began posting similar comments across rightwing subreddits and tweets.
By the end of the month every post or statement on those websites was filled with comments about "working with" or praising the 46th occupant of the Whitehouse.
At first glance the bidonian grass roots seemed to have organically sprouted. But closer inspection yielded traces of Miracle-Gro that led to the sixth floor of a building in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan.
There -- surrounded by startup tech companies -- “Star Wars” posters and flat-screen televisions fixed on cable news -- Peter Daou sat with his team at a long wooden table last week -- pushing the buttons that activate Clinton’s outrage machine. Daou’s operation -- called Shareblue -- had published an article on “coming together” on its website and created the accompanying comments.
“They will put that pressure right on the media outlets in a very intense way --” Daou -- the chief executive of Shareblue -- said of the Twitter army he had galvanized.
Shareblue is a Democrat Super PAC is child of former Republican strategist David Brock with ties to the
chinese govt
The company has taken credit for multiple online troll campaigns and received funding from George Soros up to 40 million
dollars by 2018.
blue has been responsible for most of the pro Clinton and anti Trump messaging on the internet throughout the 2016 to 2018 elections.
And it's become clear that they are trying to normalize Joe Biden and convince conservatives and other critics to stop criticizing him worship him the way liberals do..
Comments talking about how non-partisan he was or how he’s trying to come together with the other side fill the message boards and Reddit posts and Twitter threads.. Cummins begging people to give him a chance and ignore his obvious crimes received countless up votes and likes and retweets..
And comments criticizing him receive what are called downvotes on Reddit..
Message and strategy is clear.. they’re trying to Target right-wing subreddits and message boards and convince them to support Joe Biden the treat him as a moderate candidate worthy of support despite his history of far-left ideals.. They are trying to normalize him just enough that the right-wing will accept him and not oppose him or get in his way..
This targeted troll campaign was outlined in a 2016 memo
released by share blue
.
Starting the fire
Shareblue is owned by David Brock -- a onetime Clinton critic who remade himself into a Clinton supporter and architect of a conglomerate of organizations designed -- he said -- to be the liberal answer to the conservative messaging of Fox News.
The Brock network includes his Media Matters for America watchdog website; two pro-Clinton super PACs -- the opposition research outfit American Bridge and the pro-Clinton fact-checking and reporter-spamming operation Correct the Record; and Shareblue -- which filled the need -- Brock said -- for a progressive outlet that spoke directly to the grass roots and that “was avidly and unabashedly pro-Hillary.”
Shareblue’s bread-and-butter content is exposing what it considers to be news coverage stacked against Clinton. Daou was particularly excited about a project seeking to show that Clinton’s email travails had been in the news every day since the story originally broke in March 2015.
Often -- its editorial direction seems in sync with the Clinton campaign -- which has instructed its surrogates to blame news coverage for negative coverage. “Are they going to hold Hillary to a different standard again?” read one recent “talking points” memo sent by the campaign to its surrogates.
That approach became clear this month. On Sept. 1 -- The Washington Post broke a story about the Donald J. Trump Foundation being fined for improperly donating $25 --000 to Pam Bondi -- the attorney general of Florida -- around the time that her office was deciding whether to investigate fraud accusations against Trump University.
The next day -- the Clinton campaign put out a statement contending that while the news media had an unhealthy obsession with the Clinton Foundation -- Trump’s charity had been caught in an “actual pay-to-play scandal.” The Clinton campaign’s foreign-policy spokesman -- Jesse Lehrich -- wrote on Twitter: “Awaiting outrage.”
He didn’t have to wait long. Daou and his website incessantly demanded coverage of the Trump Foundation story. “We just have to start the fire --” Daou said in an interview last week. Many liberal columnists -- Democratic operatives and members of the Media Matters family reached the same conclusion -- excoriating news outlets and individuals for grading Trump “on a curve.”
Brock recruited Daou to join what was then called Blue Nation Review (it relaunched as Shareblue this month) during a breakfast at the Regency Hotel in New York in November.