The paperwork present that the orchestrators of the marketing campaign focused current divisions inside US society, utilizing racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to focus on supporters of former president Donald Trump.
”They’re afraid of shedding the American lifestyle and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in a single doc outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It’s these sentiments that needs to be exploited in the midst of an data marketing campaign in/for the USA.”
The identical doc is stuffed with racist and conspiratorial claims, together with that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of individuals of colour.” It provides that white middle-class persons are being discriminated towards with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed individuals of colour find yourself being privileged teams of the inhabitants.”
And the purpose of the marketing campaign, from the start, was crystal clear: “To safe victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote within the Good Outdated USA Challenge planning doc.
The Good Outdated USA plan brazenly admits that “not one of the important American politicians might be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so fairly than focus its efforts on making an attempt to persuade people who Russia is nice, the plan referred to as for selling the concept that the US needs to be focusing its assets much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, corresponding to rising inflation and excessive fuel costs.
“It is smart for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Celebration’s viewpoint (firstly, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Outdated USA Challenge planning doc reads. “This consists of provisions on peace in Ukraine in trade for territories, the necessity to give attention to the issues of the US financial system, returning troops house from all around the world, and so on.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, the marketing campaign’s secondary objectives included growing the share of People who imagine the US is doing an excessive amount of to help Ukraine to 51 %, and decreasing the share of People who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden right down to 29 %.
The plan lists a wide range of audiences the marketing campaign particularly needs to focus on, together with residents of swing states, American Jews, “US residents of Hispanic descent,” and the “group of American players, customers of Reddit and picture boards, corresponding to 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of players and chatroom customers because the “spine of the right-wing developments within the US phase of the Web.” In current months, the Trump marketing campaign has embraced most of the most influential figures inside these communities, together with many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric frequently.
To unfold their narrative, the plan referred to as for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content material in addition to different viral movies (“music, humor, lovely ladies and so on,” in accordance with the paperwork) with the intention to seem on the high of search outcomes for “US elections.”
In the meantime, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Fb, Twitter, and Reddit to create group teams of Trump supporters, with one pattern identify given as “Alabama for America the Nice.” The doc additionally reveals that the Russians deliberate to make use of Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it’s a platform “free from democratic censorship.”