Russia’s disinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, often believed to be the work of trolls, was in fact bigger, better coordinated, and far more effective than previously believed, according to a study by US cybersecurity firm Symantec. The study used a massive data set that Twitter had released in October 2018, which included nearly 3,900 suspended accounts and 10 million tweets. It found that the average gap between account creation and first tweet was 177 days suggesting that the campaign, run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), was far more professional — and patient — than previously thought. The most retweeted account got 6 million retweets, and fewer than 2,000 of those came from within the IRA-linked network of accounts. The accounts then remained active for an average of 429 days, well into August 2016, when almost all stopped tweeting. Two main types of accounts Symantec found that the accounts could be divided into two types — main accounts and auxiliary accounts. It said that it had identified 123 main accounts and 3,713 auxiliary accounts in the data set. Main accounts had at least 10,000 followers but followed substantially fewer accounts, and were primarily used to publish new tweets. They were generally ”fake news” outlets masquerading as regional news outlets, or pretending to be political parties. Their creation dates suggested that they were usually created individually, or in small batches. The default language selected for main accounts was always either English or Russian. Auxiliary accounts,…
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