Quote:Yesterday, CNN broke a story that tracked the online activity of a Russia-linked Facebook account across other forms of social media. The account, which founded the page “Don’t Shoot Us,” was meant to be a faux-Black Lives Matter-type activist group, but the 254,000 member page was actually run by members of the Internet Research Agency, what CNN calls a “Kremlin-linked troll farm.”

Quote:The news media’s reaction to this has been predictably alarmist, with The Hill tweeting earlier “Russia used Pokémon GO to interfere in 2016 election” with a link to their re-write of CNN’s story. Twitter was framing it in a similar fashion as the game began to trend, saying GO was “used to influence the 2016 election. That makes it sound like GO was somehow compromised in some way to give access to personal information of voters or something when nothing at all like that happened. While this was a group that was apparently trying to influence the conversation about the US election in a number of ways on Russia’s behalf, it’s hard to view this GO connection as some sort of master plot with any potential effect on the outcome at all. Still, it does appear to be part of an effort to discredit a liberal movement in the form of Black Lives Matter, which is its own kind of political sabotage.