they did have evidence though. as unbelievable as it sounds, the russian disinformation campaign on tumblr was real. the existence of many of these IRA-linked accounts on tumblr was discovered by researcher jonathan albright and reported on by buzzfeed news. some discoveries were also reported by thinkprogress and CNN. many of the accounts shared usernames and profile pictures with accounts with proven IRA connections on twitter, and they circulated each other's posts. buzzfeed informed tumblr of their discovery over a month before the infamous email was sent out. if it's unclear why the russian government would want to pretend to be a bunch of black leftists, there's an academic article that illustrates how one of the accounts operated, relying on digital blackface and spreading disinformation by posting screenshots of headlines.
with this evidence in mind, just think about what is more likely to be true. why would it be at all in tumblr's interest to send a mass email claiming these 84 random blogs were russian trolls if there were no evidence? it's a bad look for the company if election interference was carried out unchecked on its platform. if this were the result of some unfounded vendetta against these 84 specific users they believed to be black, it would be easy to just quietly terminate them and even to delete the posts originating from these blogs. but the posts were left to circulate, and tumblr's admission appears (to me, anyway) to stem from public pressure to respond rather than eagerness to admit they had hosted russian troll accounts.
this is not to say there is no bias against black or transfem users in tumblr's moderation; i have no doubt there is. but in this particular case, arguably tumblr was wrong to wait as long as they did to take action. this was a real disinformation campaign targeted to disenfranchise black american voters. under no circumstances do you have to hand it to tumblr, but it's important to understand how this happened so we can recognize things like it in the future.
and yeah, i got the email too. none of us are immune to propaganda.
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