Troll Farms and Gay Muslims September 11, 2017September 10, 2017 So it turns out a lot of us were duped. Read about Russian troll farms — Russians posing as Americans. The former KGB — headed ultimately by a man who murders journalists and political opponents (but with whom our president has a special relationship) — invested in a massive operation to beat Clinton. They came within just 3 million votes of pulling that off, enough to give Putin what he wanted. There was a time when that would have bothered most Americans. But that was before we all got great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. In small part: . . . The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda. . . . On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. . . . I’ve previously plugged Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner In Mecca: A Gay Muslim’s Hajj of Defiance. Now comes the first substantive review. To 100 million LGBT Muslims, or to the rest of us who hope to see Islam modernize, it’s a book worth reading.