Russian To Judgment, Con't

In what shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, it turns out that Russia's infiltration of Twitter ahead, during, and after the 2016 election was far worse than reported and we're seeing the exact same warning signs now as Russia is using social media to manipulate Americans' political stances on specific candidates.

Russia's infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, researchfrom cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded.

The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found. 

The company analyzed a massive data set Twitter released in October 2018 on nearly 3,900 accounts and 10 million tweets.

The research discovered that the average lag between account creation and first tweet was 177 days. The most retweeted account garnered 6 million retweets, and less than 2,000 of those came from within the IRA-linked network of accounts. The huge delay points to a lot of patient preparation, and the retweets indicate that a lot of unaffiliated Twitter users were amplifying the IRA's message.

While most of the accounts were automated, they frequently demonstrated evidence of manual manipulation, such as slight wording changes in an apparent bid to dodge detection, according to Symantec.

"While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that," the company wrote. "It was planned months in advance and the operators had the resources to create and manage a vast disinformation network."

Some accounts also appeared to generate revenue via URL shorteners, with one account even earning as much as $1 million, although those were apparently rogue accounts operating outside the IRA's main mission.

The research also found that the accounts played to both sides of the aisle more than previously believed, and that most of them were fakes pretending to be regional news outlets, while a smaller subset amplified those messages.

"The campaign directed propaganda at both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide in the U.S., in particular the more disaffected elements of both camps," Symantec found.

And the company warned in the closing message of its study: "The sheer scale and impact of this propaganda campaign is obviously of deep concern to voters in all countries, who may fear a repeat of what happened in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016."

And remember, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are doing everything they can to block any and all efforts to harden US internet against Russian operations like this.

They fully expect Russia to win them power again in 2020.  And Russia did such a good job that they actually made substantial Twitter ad revenue off the platform.  No wonder Twitter didn't bother to shut them down until last year.