How Russian troll farms infiltrated American society and destabilized politics

The Digital Forensic Research Lab of think tank Atlantic Council deep dived into Twitter’s recent data dump, analyzing some 10 million tweets associated with Russian troll farms supported by the Internet Research Agency.

The operation to infiltrate and destabilize US politics ran from as early as 2013 until present. Only last week the US Department of Justice announced the arrest of a Russian woman accused of masterminding the $35-million operation.

DFRLab detected a high number of retweets, mostly of US alt-right advocates, but the trolls appear to have shared news and comments related to all political parties, conspiracy theorizing and alt-right websites. Fox News was the most-shared news source, followed by a Russian website and alt-right Breitbart.

US President Donald Trump’s tweets were retweeted 3,970 times by Russian trolls, Trump being the most retweeted figure, especially in the second part of 2016 when elections were approaching, according to the research.

@CovfefeNationUS is the account that mostly focused on retweeting Donald Trump’s posts. Other figures retweeted are Ted Cruz (196 times), Jeb Bush (13 times), Bernie Sanders (256 times), Jill Stein (262 times) and Hillary Clinton (250 times). The troll accounts retweeted both positive and negative news about Hillary Clinton, especially during the election campaign.

Heavy alt-right activity was promoted through the retweets.

“The troll accounts frequently retweeted voices on the American “alt-right” — significantly more than their left-wing rivals,” DFRLab writes. “Among a sample of leading partisan and media voices online, top billing went to InfoWars editor Paul Joseph Watson, Twitter handle @PrisonPlanet, whom the troll accounts retweeted 3,215 times.”

Alt-right activists the trolls retweeted include Jack Posobiec (1,396 times), who in turn retweeted a troll account, Mike Cernovich (753 times) and Alex Jones (625 times).

Conservative activists such as Fox TV host Sean Hannity (990 times), Fox host Laura Ingraham ( 704 times), Trump advocate Ann Coulter (652 times) and Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway (356 times) were also retweeted for further significant Twitter coverage and “outnumbered retweets of liberal or left-leaning users.”

In their communication on Twitter, Russian trolls called CNN ‘fake news,’ but they also retweeted CNN anchors and hosts Jim Acosta ( 32 times), Jake Tapper (164 times) and Anderson Cooper (5 times).