Russian Trolls Stoked Anger Over Black Lives Matter More Than Was Previously Known
Source: Mother Jones
As Twitter shares more about the actions of thousands of known Russian accounts – including the company’s recent revelation to Congress that in the two months before the election, Russian-linked bots retweeted @realdonaldtrump 470,000 times vs. retweeting Hillary Clinton’s account fewer than 50,000 times – the UW research sheds further light on a deliberate strategy the Russian government used to play both sides of an emotional American debate.
In data collected over a nine-month period ending in October 2016, the UW team found clearly defined left-leaning and right-leaning clusters—about 10,000 accounts in each sphere—tweeting about police shootings and including the three hashtags related to #BlackLivesMatter. Two of the Russian accounts found were among the top 12 most-retweeted accounts overall across all 20,000 accounts. “This suggests that troll content was relatively widely broadcasted in the contexts of this network,” the research team wrote in their findings. “On both sides, we see troll accounts gaining traction in polarized, audience-driven discourse.”
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/russian-trolls-hyped-anger-over-black-lives-matter-more-than-previously-known/
= new reply since forum marked as read
