Time to do something dumb: EXPRESS PARANOIA.
So here’s the thing that makes this whole “HA HA RUSSIAN TUMBLR BOTS” even dumber: They didn’t spread anything novel, rather act as an echo chamber for things desired to be expressed all the more. They were less disinformation or chaos spreading bots, and more reblogs with slightly edited social commentary or social discourse.
Posited as referenced evidence:
When Ars briefly went through some of the old posts saved on the Internet Archive, it seemed that relatively few posts were directly pertinent to the presidential campaign. Many of the posts, for instance, touched on black-oriented social justice topics. We did find one post that specifically advocated in favor of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
Combined with that, this makes even less sense. A tumblr post isn’t the same as a fake news post unless it carries direct misinformation for the purpose of emotional reactions to non-existent problems. But that isn’t what happened. All of these blogs were mostly dedicated to heavily tagged social issues in America. While some of the listed ones could be accused of being communist, they definitely weren’t pro-Putin, and even fewer of the mere 84 total revealed accounts went anywhere close to the point of encouraging people not to vote against Trump in the election. Unlike many of the Facebook Russian bots that produced massive misinformation campaigns, none of the Tumblr ones seemed to have attempted to reach such massively deceptive levels.
What they did do, however, is establish an apparent connection between social discourse and social unrest and the ability to label and discredit such online social media displays as something stemming only from Anti-American Foreign Powers and something to be censored/policed as dangerous by American authorities and corporations.
And that, regardless of who created those accounts and for what reason, is far more terrifying.
It didn’t undermine America. It undermined the ability to express about America.