Her son was killed — then came the Russian trolls
In January 2017, seven months after Castile's death, and two months after the election of Donald Trump, the US intelligence community released a report saying the Russian government had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that they had used social media to do it.
What form the interference on social media took, however, wasn't clear. Some observers speculated that the Russians may have used social media to spread the details of hacked Democratic Party emails or even have run Trump-supporting accounts in an effort to undermine the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
Both, and more, would turn out to be correct.
In September 2017, CNN uncovered a sham organization called "Blacktivist." The group described itself as a black American activist campaign and had been active on social media for years. It even had a bigger following than the official Black Lives Matter Facebook page.
CNN confirmed Blacktivist was not a real American group, however. It was a troll operation run from 4,000 miles away in St. Petersburg, Russia, by a Kremlin-linked group known as the Internet Research Agency.
The revelations helped to show Russia's use of social media to interfere in American life extended beyond the presidential election, and into efforts to exacerbate existing divisions in the U.S.
A few weeks later, in October 2017, CNN found another group posing as an organization of Black Lives Matter activists -- "Don't Shoot."
As CNN began investigating "Don't Shoot," it found that activists like Grimm and Tyler had expressed some suspicions about the group in online posts a year earlier. They hadn't, however, suspected it was Russian.
When Valerie Castile, Philando's mother, learned about Don't Shoot's Russian roots, she was annoyed her son's death had been used by the campaign.
"We stand by truth and justice. That's what this country was built off of," she said during an interview for a new CNN short documentary, "Distorting the truth: Russian hacking beyond the election."
"God gave him to me, nobody had the right to take him from me. One man should not have that much power to say whether who lives and who dies. No, one man shouldn't have that much power, and then to take such a sad situation and exploit it, no, I don't like that at all and for them to use my baby, no."
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By 2016, American prosecutors allege, the Internet Research Agency was "primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton."
According to prosecutors, an internal memo circulated in February 2016 read, "to use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump -- we support them)."
Later in 2016, according to the indictment, the group began trying to discourage African Americans from voting.
One post on a fake black activist account highlighted by prosecutors read, "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL."
The group's creation and promotion of a protest after Castile's death wasn't unusual, congressional investigators and journalists would later find. The troll group even ran elaborate schemes that involved recruiting unwitting Americans. In one case, the group paid for a woman in Florida to dress as Hillary Clinton in a prison outfit and attend a "lock her up" rally.
The group had given control of the Castile protest over to real groups in Minneapolis, essentially turning the real activists into unwitting operatives, helping against their will to stage an event conceived of in Russia.
The group's successful exploitation of American activism shows the perils of campaigning in the digital age.
Facebook, the same platform where Diamond Reynolds would stream the last moments of her boyfriend's life to the world, the same platform real activists would use to organize the response to Castile's death, would also be where a Russian government-linked group would seek to exploit the tragedy.
Some may argue, despite sinister motivations, the Russian group raised awareness of problems in American society that do not get enough attention.
The struggles of American minorities were often highlighted by the Internet Research Agency and continue to be shown by official Kremlin-backed channels like RT, the Russian-run 24-hour news network that broadcasts in the US.
But Valerie Castile isn't convinced, "We don't need Russia," she says.
"We got enough intelligent people, we don't need Russia to intervene, like, 'oh, you're not doing your job, we need to step in and help you.' No, we don't need Russia's help."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/us/russian-trolls-exploit-philando-castiles-death/index.html
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