Putnam County NY tweets - all h***breaking lose

I can’t get it to open on my phone. What is going on?

Is this the man who barricaded himself for domestic violence?

Only news I see from that area is barricaded male who finally surrendered for DV

Updates say he surrendered peacefully, has some charges and no guns or ammo were taken away.

This is exactly the kind of situation Russian bots and trolls amplify and exacerbate, hoping for a body count.

Yep. It's an issue that's very emotional to many Americans, and by falsely portraying the guy as a victim under duress from "tyrannical" LE, you get a ton of instant media traction and perhaps even hopped-up vigilantes driving to the location, armed to the teeth to "defend" their constitutional rights. Then you would have a multiple stand-off, to result in injury and possibly multiple deaths. 

Then the trolls would angle new disinfo, most likely using it in two directions as they have in the past. One group would take the side of cops, calling for the death of citizens who have guns. The other group would vilify the police and amp up paranoia, hoping to create martyrs and repeat clashes. Chaos reigns. Americans turn on each other. Mission accomplished.

Russian active measures are fascinating. The media has mostly focused on The Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg overseen by Torshin - one of Putin's lieutenants, but most online actions/operations are overseen by the GRU (nicknamed "Cozy Bear" by our intelligence.)  This is significant because the GRU is a branch of the military. The Cold War never stopped. We thought it was over - only certain Russian experts at Langley suspected it wasn't, but nobody listened to them for years. We've paid for that dearly.

They don't just target "conservative" issues. You know all of those viral videos where some dumbass sees a black person at their pool and calls the cops? Russian trolls and their bot machines amplify those as well. Again, they break into groups, one shouting about how all white people are racist, evil, should be beaten up, etc. Other groups will engage in blatantly racist memes and threats, and work to shut down dialogue and fan hatred. When Black Panther was released, the trolls were spreading false rumors about white people going to see it and getting beaten up by black moviegoers. This. Never. Happened. 

Russian propaganda is an art. They've been gaslighting their own people since the czars. They know what they're doing, and find and exploit various fault lines in society to weaken people and turn them against each other. We underestimate them at our peril.