Russian Twitter trolls are attacking Morgan Freeman, and is nothing sacred?

How dare they?!
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
Russian Twitter trolls are attacking Morgan Freeman, and is nothing sacred?
Does this look like a man worried about Russian trolls? Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Variety/REX/Shutterstock

First the Russians came for our election and our social media platforms, and now they're coming for another beloved institution: Morgan Freeman.

Russian Twitter — maybe bots, maybe people, who knows the difference anymore — has exploded in anger towards the famed actor, using the hashtag "#StopMorganLie" to show their disgust with Freeman.

But what did the Shawshank Savior actually do to deserve this?

It all started with director Rob Reiner and Atlantic editor David Frum who are promoting the Committee to Investigate Russia, a "nonprofit, non-partisan resource" intended to, well, educate Americans about the seriousness of Russia's attacks on American democracy.

As part of this campaign, the group enlisted frequent portrayer of God/God-like figures Morgan Freeman to do a video highlighting all of the shenanigans Russians are accused of partaking in related to the U.S. presidential election of 2016.

So, naturally, the Russians are mad online like so many MAGA hat burners, and they're turning to social media to take aim at Freeman (who clearly has a lot of influence in Russia if they're getting this mad about it).

And it's not just bots totally real, human people on Twitter that are mad. Per the Washington Post, Russian officials are also denouncing the video as propaganda.

In response to Freeman's video, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, "many performing artists easily succumb to becoming victims of emotional strain with no real information about the real state of things."

And a Russian TV channel accused Freeman of falling prey to “a Messianic complex resulting from playing God or the president in several films, not to mention ‘drug abuse.’”

As for Freeman, he hasn't commented on the Russian backlash but one assumes he's too busy chilling in Zihuatanejo to really care about it.

Topics Politics

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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