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Twitter Notifies 1.4 Million Users of Interaction With Russian Accounts (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: At least 1.4 million people on Twitter engaged with content created by Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential election, the company revealed on Wednesday. That's more than double the amount that Twitter initially identified -- and perhaps still just a fraction of the full universe of users who may have witnessed Kremlin propaganda over that period. In announcing the new data in a blog post, Twitter also said it had notified all 1.4 million affected users that they saw election disinformation. That fulfilled a pledge that the company previously made to members of Congress who are investigating Russia's tactics on social media. Notified users included those that followed one of the roughly 3,000 accounts belonging to the Internet Research Agency, the troll army tied to the Russian government, as well as users who retweeted, replied, liked or mentioned those IRA accounts in their tweets. But Twitter did not alert users who merely saw Russian troll tweets in their feeds but did not interact with the content. Nor did it reach out to users who saw tweets from the roughly 50,000 Russian bots that tweeted election-related content around November 2016.
Put a flag icon of the accounts country of origin over their tweets. That way you can see where it's coming from.
Which should beg the question: What's the difference between foreign political trolling and domestic political campaigning? We already allow corporations and any domestic actor to express their political opinions, constructively and not. Is it somehow different when it's a foreign actor?
"... commit myself to defend ... the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ..."
Since the Ukrainian vote to join the EU, Russia has gone on an all-out propaganda offensive with the intention to split the west and weaken NATO. Russia regards the Ukraine as its "home-turf" and buffer against perceived NATO "aggression", and it regards the EU as the gateway to NATO membership for eastern European countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union.
Russia feels as if NATO is encroaching on its sphere of influence and waging an "underhanded" war of political expansion. Looking at a map you will see how one by one, former Soviet republics have been converted into NATO countries.
Russia also feels that this NATO expansion is a violation of a promise made to Gorbachev at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that NATO would not expand to the east.
For this reasons Russia has decided to go on the offensive and start fighting NATO. Not by military means, since it does not have the means to seriously compete with NATO, but by information warfare, taking full advantage of the traits of our open societies, such as freedom of speech and of the press. Using fake news and trolls that sow discontent and dissent, it intends to cause a rift between our countries and institutions.
Russian agents already provided plenty of cannon fodder to the Brexit crew and succeeded in swaying public opinion. Everything that causes a rift through the EU and NATO is good for Russia.
Russia is very active in spreading fake news and inciting discontent around far-right groups in Europe, using the refugee crisis to full effect (fake news about rapists, terrorists and other criminals among refugees) to strengthen the far-right and to politically destabilize European nations, especially Germany and France. Fortunately these activities have only had marginal success thus far, with the far-right Front National in France and the AfD in Germany gaining some votes, but not enough to pose a serious threat to the political establishment.
It had resounding success in the U.S. were it just so managed to tip the scale in favor of Trump, the weaker candidate, and the US government and especially foreign policy is practically paralyzed and ineffectual at the moment. If you want some information or evidence on these activities, it's really only a good google search away.
Russian activities in Germany and Europe:
https://www.nato.int/docu/Revi...
http://time.com/4889471/german...
https://www.politico.eu/articl...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
On Russia's overall strategy and interference in the US:
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
That should be a good start to get an idea.