Russian trolls went on attack during key election moments

[iluvtennis]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-trolls-went-attack-during-key-election-moments-n827176

DEC 20 2017, 11:11 AM ET
Thousands of Russian trolls targeted national events during the 2016 U.S. presidential election to infiltrate the online conversations of millions of Americans, according to a new analysis of a database of recovered troll tweets by NBC News.

The records show how digital communications tools invented by U.S. companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, were instead exploited by the Kremlin-backed agents to promote autocracy and fear.

Twitter has identified 2,752 accounts as being linked to the Kremlin. In November, Congress released the list of account names.

NBC News took those names and cross-referenced it against data held by three sources familiar with Twitter's API, an online system that allows software developers to work user data, generated a database of 202,973 tweets sent by known Russian trolls. The sources asked that their names be withheld to avoid being identified as possibly violating Twitter's developer policy.

The resulting database from 454 of the identified accounts is "one of the largest" known repositories of deleted Russian Twitter troll activity to date, according to Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Those tweets from accounts impersonating real Americans earned 2.1 million retweets and nearly 1.9 million favorites from their duped followers.

While no single tweet from a fake account threw the race, the matrix of Russian troll activity reveals the shape of a sophisticated, researched and targeted effort by a foreign adversary to subvert the conversations and opinions of Americans as they chose their next president.





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Wonder if the Russian Trolls caused the big DH outage on election day.

[BigmanPigman]

1. Watch this video posted on DU earlier this year...scary and real.

Facebook sent its employees to Donald Trump’s campaign office to help with online marketing
Facebook is finally admitting that it allowed fake Russian accounts to run paid political ads during the election (link). Although Facebook says it’s now cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the revelation is bringing new attention to the relationship between Facebook Incorporated and the Donald Trump campaign. That relationship involved Facebook sending its employees to help out at the Trump campaign office in charge of digital marketing. The source of this information: one of Trump’s own people.
In an online BBC video, Theresa Hong, the Donald Trump campaign’s Digital Content Director, has made a number of startling confessions that she seems to think were bragging points. She’s revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the company suspected of having used voter data stolen by the Russian government to plot its online marketing strategy on Trump’s behalf, ran its operations out of the same offices where the Trump campaign itself was plotting its paid Facebook ad strategy. But the truly shocking revelation is who else she admits was in the building, which Trump’s people called “Project Alamo.”



The BBC interviewer asks Hong, “What were Facebook and Google and YouTube people actually doing here? Why were they here?” She responds by saying “They were helping us, you know. They were basically our hands-on partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Shen then bragged “When you’re pumping in millions and millions of dollars to these social platforms, you’re going to get white glove treatment. So they would send people, you know, representatives to the Project Alamo

Link to tweet

[iluvtennis]

2. Yep, saw that. Thanks for the post. So, disgusting how Russia has/is attacking our democracy