Interesting story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal about how Russian bots were being directed to try to keep Mit Romney from becoming Secretary of State in the new Trump Administration. I’m not sure the secondary reference to the New Yorker article on Christopher Steele is worth looking at, since it is biased and misleading, but the Journal article is pretty even in its coverage. There is also a nice video clip embedded in it that shows how the Russian trolls got information from a number of people.
I was reading the House Intelligence Committee report on the Russian involvement in the US election and it numbers for the troll accounts and numbers of US people who saw them. Facebook had 120 pages built which were likely seen by126 million people. Twitter has around 2700 accounts that generated 1.4 million tweets. Google had about 1100 videos viewed by about 300,000 people. How much influence this could have had is speculation, but t it does show how a small investment can reach a large audience. It also shows that the Russians have not stopped their campaigns- they just modified them. We should do more to disrupt them and keep their agents off of our social media. DOf course that media has to cooperate with the US Intelligence Community for that to happen. Let’s start a Facebook page for that!
Of course, if you read my blog, you know I think these numbers were intentionally underestimated by the vendors involved.
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