Trolls Amped Up Tweets for Pro-Trump Content in 2017
Ben ElginEditor’s note: The central points of this article, which was originally published Aug. 15, 2018, have been invalidated by revisions that Twitter Inc. subsequently made to a database of more than 3,000 accounts linked to a Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency. On Feb. 8, 2019, the social-media company removed 228 accounts from that database after company officials determined they were misidentified as being linked to the IRA. Those 228 accounts were largely responsible for the activity highlighted in this article, according to researchers at Clemson University, whose own compilation of IRA-linked tweets provided some of the data for the article. The revised data do not show that the Russian trolling operation increased its Twitter presence to new heights in July 2017, nor that Russian trolls were focused on popularizing headlines and news stories that originally appeared on the U.S.-based news site, Truthfeed. For transparency’s sake, the text of the original story remains below.
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