Washington (AFP)
Russian efforts to spread false information on Twitter ahead of the 2016 US presidential election were more professionally organized than previously thought, security experts said on Wednesday.
The creation of some Russian-linked accounts dated back to 2014, and manipulation attempts included both "bots" (computer programs that automatically send messages) and manual operations, according to a report from the computer security group. Symantec.
This propaganda campaign was not just the work of some "trolls" (users posting intentionally provocative and offensive messages), but was "planned months in advance," said Gillian Cleary from Symantec. "It was a highly professional campaign."
This report was made possible by Twitter's availability of researchers for some 10 million tweets last year - even though this misinformation campaign also took place on other social networks, such as Facebook.
"We have made great strides since 2016 to counter manipulation on our services," including the release of this data for research purposes, said a spokesman for Twitter.
According to Symantec, accounts - often referred to as media or political organizations - were created well in advance of their use, an average of 177 days before their first tweet.
While most accounts were automated, there were also signs of manual intervention, such as wording changes to make the messages appear more authentic and thus reduce the risk of their deletion.
Real users were then invited to retweet them - with a message reaching 6 million shares - and some even led to the organization of events in the real world.
? 2019 AFP