Russian Bots Are Trying to Sow Discord on Twitter After Charlottesville - Slate
by April Glaser
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/08/24/russian_bots_are_sharing_extreme_right_wing_information_on_twitter_after.html
Although the recent events in Charlottesville happened 5,000 miles from Moscow, Russia didn’t sit this one out. As has become almost routine after every polarizing U.S. political event in the past 12 months, online Russian propagandists quickly got involved. This time around, they took to Twitter with an army of bots to promote and share extremist right-wing tweets and disinformation.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund that tracks efforts to undermine democratic governments, monitors a collection of 600 Twitter accounts that are known to be linked to Russian influence, including openly pro-Russian users, accounts that take part in Russian disinformation campaigns, and automated bot accounts that parrot Russian messaging. They found these accounts busy at work in the days after Charlottesville. “PhoenixRally,” “Antifa,” and “MAGA" were among the most common hashtags used by these accounts this week. One of the central themes shared by the Russian-linked accounts after Charlottesville was an accusation, propagated by both the Russian news agency Sputnik and American far-right media personality Alex Jones, that the left-leaning philanthropist George Soros had supported the counter-protesters.
One example of a likely bot was an account under the name Angee Dixson, opened on Aug. 8, the Tuesday before the Charlottesville rally started, as reported by ProPublica . Described in her Twitter bio as a conservative Christian, Angee sent about 90 tweets out a day, in which she vigorously defended President Trump’s response to the rally and shared pictures that allegedly showed violence on the part of the counter-protesters in Charlottesville. The account has now been shut down.
“BUSTED! Craigslist Ad Exposes Firm Hiring #AltLeft “Protesters” for $25/Hr,” read one of Dixson’s tweets. That was one of five tweets she sent in one minute, according to the archive link of her account. All those tweets contained links that had been shortened using a URL shortener, which usually requires going to a separate web site to enter in the URL to generate a new link, and that takes time. The tremendous speed with which Dixson was able to send her tweets indicates that Angee Dixson was most likely an automated bot, not a real human. Even the account’s profile picture was stolen. ProPublica linked it to a photo of model that at one point was rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio. Though it’s hard to directly link any one bot to its source, Angee’s tweets were reported to use similar language from Russian government backed outlets Sputnik and RT.
snip - more at the link above
