Monday, April 2, 2018

A Russian on BlackLivesMatterMedia.com?

I've written previously about BlackLivesMatter1, a sketchy Facebook page claiming to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement.  The Facebook page frequently linked to a middleman site, BlackLivesMatter.media, which was structured a lot like Reddit:  The site contained links to news articles, and visitors were encouraged to create an account and upvote or downvote the different threads.

I don't think BlackLivesMatter.media ever became popular in its own right.  Hardly any links received more than 1 upvote, and most of the people who registered accounts seemed to be hawking products.  After I published my first article, BlackLivesMatter.media disappeared, and it was replaced a couple months later by BlackLivesMatterMedia.com.  The new site was structured exactly like the old site, and my impression is that all the accounts registered on BlackLivesMatter.media were carried over to BlackLivesMatterMedia.com.

One of theoe accounts was "AbenaTau," and I made an archive of their profile here: http://archive.is/efaRd.  AbenaTau submitted 13 links:

6 links to BlackMattersUS.com
3 links to AtlantaBlackStar.com
2 links to DoNotShoot.us
2 links to HuffingtonPost.com

BlackMattersUS.com and DoNotShoot.us have both been identified as domains controlled by Russia's Internet Research Agency.  I doubt any of AbenaTau's links were viewed more than a couple times, but still...it's mildly interesting!  I wonder where else the IRA spammers tried promoting their sites?