On September 27, U.S. Senator James Lankford said Russian-linked internet trolls and bots were amplifying Twitter posts on both sides of the controversy surrounding the National Football League (NFL).

Lankford said trolls were amplifying the hashtags #TakeAKnee and #BoycottNFL, “taking both sides of the argument…to just raise the noise level in America and to make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they’re trying to push divisiveness in the country.”

@DFRLab and colleagues in the open-source community analyzed traffic on both hashtags, looking for indications of bot activity. We found a number of active botnets, but in most, no immediate link with Russia was visible.

The exception was a botnet which mainly posts commercial spam in a range of languages. This boosted a post on #TakeAKnee and had earlier been involved in a major bot attack on @DFRLab. That bot attack was itself triggered by a post linking the American far right with Russia.

Taking on #TakeAKnee

On September 23, the hashtag #TakeAKnee went viral as NFL players protested racial injustice and systematic inequality, which was put in the spotlight when U.S. President Donald Trump made comments disparaging the NFL players’ protest. The hashtag was not new, but it exploded from a few dozen tweets per day to over 770,000 in one day.