lines-and-edges:

When Rachel Dolezal posed as a black person to conduct activism on the behalf of black people, there was massive outrage. The fact that she was working for the NAACP and had a sufficient track record of activism to be hired by them didn’t make up for the fact that she was appropriating an identity to do it.

Think about this when you think about the Russian propaganda blogs. There’s a popular post from one of them (4mysquad) with a list of alternatives to policing. Well, that post is stolen. The original, linked above, was posted in 2014 and is still being updated.

Many of the other popular posts on the Russian blogs are screenshots of someone else’s Twitter content. This is a normally accepted form of content transfer because it makes information accessible on another platform – but in this context, it’s just another instance of white people taking the credit for black people’s work.

Don’t be fooled. If you want to know the real origin of a post that looks like good content, putting two separate phrases from it into a search engine in quotation marks often does the trick.