“Tennessee GOP,” or @TEN_GOP, was a popular Twitter account claiming to be run by, well, Republicans in Tennessee. Tweeting out a mix of pro-Trump cheerleading, ordinary partisan content, Islamophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories, the account amassed at least 136,000 followers. Its tweets often racked up thousands of retweets, sometimes even from top Trump campaign staffers.
23 tweets from @TEN_GOP, one Russian-run Twitter account mentioned in Mueller’s new indictment
The account insisted, naturally, that Russia didn’t interfere in the election.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
And it turns out a Russian organization was running it all along.
According to a new indictment of 13 Russian people and 3 Russian entities released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team Friday, a Russian organization “created and controlled the Twitter account, ‘Tennessee GOP,’ which used the handle @TEN_GOP.”
Twitter finally shut down the @TEN_GOP account in August of last year, and two reports from BuzzFeed News and the Daily Beast have more on the details of what happened there.
But it’s worth taking a look back at just what this Russian account was putting out there, both before the election and after it.
A review of many of its past tweets reveal some that appear to be deliberately advancing a pro-Russian propaganda agenda, and others that appear more aimed at staying “in character” in the fake identity of a Tennessee Republican. (It’s hard to see the propaganda purpose in, for instance, a tweet saying the late Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds are “singin the rain in the heavens now.”)
And despite occasional spelling or grammatical flubs (which, in fairness, native-born American accounts sometimes make too), there’s a perhaps surprising amount of sophistication in how @TEN_GOP understood US political dynamics, and how it attempted to make mischief.
So here, courtesy of screencaps from the Wayback Machine, are some of the now-deleted account’s most notable tweets.
The Russian account wants you to know that Russians didn’t interfere with the election
The Russian account supports the firing of James Comey
The Russian account does not want Julian Assange prosecuted
The Russian account likes Marine Le Pen and likes Trump’s position on NATO
The Russian account is often just flat-out racist or Islamophobic
The Russian account often spread anti-Democrat conspiracy theories
The Russian account is also sometimes just totally random
See More:
