This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

With Krylova’s field guide in hand, Russia’s trolls started in on Texas and spread out from there. In September 2014 the IRA launched a Heart of Texas Facebook group and started pumping out pro-Texan secessionist memes, #texit hashtags, and the usual scare tactics: Hillary Clinton was coming to take their guns away, and the like. Within a year the group had generated 5.5 million Facebook likes. Then, in a countermove, the IRA created a separate Facebook group, the United Muslims of America, and promoted rallies and counterrallies outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston. Demonstrators from the Heart of Texas group confronted pro-Muslim protesters across the street in a terrifying real-world standoff that Russia’s digital puppeteers were coordinating from five thousand miles away. Even the Russian trolls back in St. Petersburg couldn’t believe the Americans were so gullible.