Someone REALLY wants Trump to get a second term! (Thread) https://t.co/MFo6N7zuWe

Something appears fishy with conservative columnist running smears on behalf of a "Russian troll hunter" about an open pro-Bernie subreddit before the man even announces he's running.

Prominent pro-Sanders subreddit 'WayOfTheBern' compared to foreign trolling operation

Something appears fishy with WayOfTheBern, a prominent Reddit page dedicated to advancing the prospects of Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, according to experts who track political social media.

The second-largest Sanders fan page on the massive social media platform sometimes acts like a foreign trolling operation, they say, exposing its 24,000 members to the same pro-Moscow and American dissension stories associated with other fringe sites and suspect social media accounts, say experts who have studied the page.

“I consider it extremely suspicious,” said Josh Russell, a prominent analyst on social media politics who tweets about it as @Josh_Emerson. Mr. Russell thinks it more likely that WayOfTheBern is a false flag run by alt-right people than Russia, although he said the patterns of posts are quite similar.

“I don’t think these people give a rat’s ass about Bernie Sanders,.”” he said. “This is designed to divide Democrats

WayOfTheBern, started in 2016 as an alternative to the main SandersForPresident subreddit, remained faithful to its hero even after he lost the Democratic nomination that year. Now, as the Vermont independent ponders another presidential run, the forum is still committed, though it has added Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her presidential bid last month.

The subreddit targets nearly every other potential candidate.

“We’ve seen large amounts of what we call ‘troll-bots,’ and a significant number of these accounts pushing Bernie and Gabbard,” said Christopher Bouzy of BotSentinel.com, which closely tracks political social media and has been a longtime critic of WayOfTheBern. “We do believe many of them are coming from foreign entities, particularly Russia or the Middle East.”

The critical mass of Twitter accounts that mimic WayOfTheBern by praising Mr. Sanders and savaging other top Democrats all point to coordinated activity of the sort Mr. Sanders has decried, Mr. Bouzy noted.

“We see more of this promoting him, and while they attack [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren and [Sen. Kamala D.] Harris they don’t attack Bernie,” he said. “The anti-Bernie traffic is almost non-existent, and usually this is part of a bigger conspiracy.”

....

There’s also nothing criminal about such activity, and First Amendment protections make it hard to curtail posts and tweets.

Yet with such a large community associated with Mr. Sanders having such dubious provenance, and engaged in the identical sort of activity that he and other Democrats have so vigorously crusaded against, it seems odd that neither he nor his people have warned people about the Reddit site.

Mr. Sanders‘ 2016 campaign did have to deal with phony Facebook pages that employed similar tactics.

“Of course they know,” Mr. Russell said. “His campaign should definitely be aware of these things, and we know that nefarious things might be happening.”