Twitter, almost one year after the US national election, has finally come up with 1000 more accounts that were associated with the Russian Political Warfare campaign to undermine the US election process. The main social media giants were particularly loose about how they hunted for accounts that were owned by the Russians, making us all think that they were making so much money from them, they hated to shut them off. Second, that they were trying to downplay the size of the actual campaign, which their efforts showed was small.
They are only doing it now because they face regulation, something they might deserve more now than last year this time. Now they are all three in a bind. They downplayed the numbers, then found more accounts, and now face the obvious regulation that comes from political actions they should have no part in.
The Russians have gotten a lot of good use out of social media, in Brexit, in the French and German elections, and our own US elections. They had not cut off these accounts, saying they did not know they were being funded by the Russians. Do you not know who your customers are? They knew, but the Russians were funding both sides of arguments to keep the chaos going. That revenue stream would have been pretty good, and drawn many more people to their platforms. People equal Revenue. It doesn matter if they are German, Dutch, French or Americans, the social media make money from controversy. It is in their interests to have more of it, and the Russians were more than happy to oblige them.
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