A fake porn video that claimed to show Hillary Clinton engaging in a sex act has been traced back to a Reddit account which the platform acknowledged on Tuesday is linked to a Russian troll farm.
The account, u/rubinjer, was banned but is being kept up for the time being for purposes of transparency, Reddit said. The account was used to post pro-Trump, racially divisive, anti-Clinton messages.
The fake porno was titled “This is How Hillary gets black votes.” It linked to an animated gif that NBC News said was still available on the platform as of Tuesday. Links to the video and gif have now been deleted, according to the BBC.
NBC News said that the same faux gif was posted five times to PornHub under the name “Leaked Hillary Clinton’s Hotel Sex Tape with Black Guy,” and also onto the porn site SpankBang.
NBC News reports that it had been viewed more than 250,000 times on PornHub.
Over the past month, Reddit has been investigating how its platform might have been used to spread Russian propaganda.
When it posted its yearly transparency report on Tuesday, Reddit said that so far, it’s found and removed a few hundred accounts that are suspected of having come from the Russian propaganda factory called the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Specifically, it’s found 944 suspicious accounts, which it listed here.
Out of all the 944 suspicious accounts, the rubinjer account was the IRA’s most popular: it had 99,493 upvotes at the time Reddit closed it down.
In Tuesday’s post, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman said this is how the platform is identifying Russian propaganda accounts:
There were a number of signals: suspicious creation patterns, usage patterns (account sharing), voting collaboration, etc. We also corroborated our findings with public lists from other companies (e.g. Twitter).
With regards to the fake Clinton sex video, however, its existence was first revealed when IRA whistleblower Alan Baskaev told the Russian television channel TV Rain about it. He said that the troll factory had hired a black man and a Hillary Clinton look-alike to make the sex tape. It wasn’t until Reddit posted the list of suspended accounts that the link to Russian trolls was credibly made.
The Reddit community didn’t fall for much of this stuff. Huffman said that one heartening aspect turned up by the investigation is the community’s clear-eyed skepticism: moderators banned more than half of the Russia-linked accounts, and a majority of the posts, “before they got any traction at all.”