New Round of Trolls

We seem to be again getting drips of information about the use of trolls by Russia to influence different groups in the US through social media.  If they are doing it here, you can bet they are doing it in many other countries where my readers are located.  Today, the Wall Street Journal and a few others have published stories on the latest, a series of 1100 names of accounts that were on Twitter, adding to the total of 3800 that have been announced.

I have said many times that the Intelligence Community (in this case, the House Intelligence Committee) should be involved in identifying these troll accounts and getting them cleaned up.  It will take a few minutes to get more accounts for the Russian groups doing this, so slowing them down is not the objective. It is because we get to see what kinds of things these trolls have been supporting.   It can't just be the Internet Research Agency doing it because the Russians are smarter than that.   Tracking them down is no small feat, but the intelligence services of the world are capable of doing it.  All they have to do is cooperate.  The UK, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Latvia, and others we don't know so much about, all need to cooperate to identify, and sabotage, these operations.  That is the only way to discourage further interference. That is what the social media services do not like.

I wonder what the motivation for allowing this to continue might be?  In the US, it seems clear the opposition party that released this information believes the Russians were helping the US President get into the job, a myth they perpetuate even though it is just as clear that the Russians were trying to keep Hillary Clinton out of that job - for what they thought were good reasons.  Those are not the same thing.  Anybody but Hillary was their slogan, and stirring up trouble was just a side benefit of creating channels for communications about divisive issues.  This article shows what they did in that regard, and it looks like it was successful in getting thousands of people to forward their statements and opinions to others on Twitter.  We already have been through the additional fake accounts on Facebook and there were plenty of those.  Hundreds of thousands of fake messages every day, on both sides of issues, just to keep the pot boiling on divisive issues.

We have only scratched the surface of what was really being done because the social media vendors do not want to know the answers to who was doing this and why.  I noticed yesterday that Fox News is saying 40% of people indicate they have cancelled at least one social media account in the last year.  If true, it would be a lesson to those companies that intentionally hid the real results of those reviews they did after getting hammered by one Congressional Committee after another.  I suspect that part is only starting.