Pro-Russia Twitter bots have a new strategy

[dalton99a]

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41203789

Pro-Russia Twitter bots have a new strategy
Co-ordinated groups of Twitter bots pushing pro-Russian propaganda have developed an odd but occasionally effective strategy - retweeting messages that the bot-makers disagree with and flooding their enemies with followers.

Brian Krebs is an investigative journalist with a big social media following. But even he was surprised when one of his tweets was retweeted thousands of times:

Link to tweet

"I woke up the next morning and found about 12,000 retweets... I also found I had about the same number of new followers," he told BBC Trending radio. "Part of me wanted this to be true (and all the followers to be real)."

Krebs, who wrote about the experience on his blog, immediately suspected he'd been on the receiving end of a bot attack.

Bots - automated or semi-automated accounts which tweet or retweet automatically - have been at the centre of allegations of Russian interference in Western elections. US intelligence agencies claim that bots spread false news stories and misinformation during the 2016 presidential election campaign. And networks of bots were also involved in spreading memes, gifs and misinformation in the run-up to the French presidential election in spring 2017.