Twitter Reveals That Russian Bots Retweeted Trump 470,000 Times During the Elections

It has been a long-running fence as to how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made an overwhelming use of social media during the Usa presidential election. And here's the latest asset of information that surfaced every bit a result of Congressional probe: The Russia-linked accounts shared Donald Trump'southward tweets virtually one-half a million times during the ballot run.

The findings were released by Twitter in a report compiled for the The states Senate commission, which is looking into the effect. It is too worth noting that this is the first time that Twitter has revealed such a detailed review of the tweets impacting the elections.

Co-ordinate to a argument by Twitter, the accounts retweeted so-candidate Donald Trump 10 times more than they retweeted his rival, Hillary Clinton.

The Russian bots retweeted Trump near 470,000 times between Sept. 1 and November. 15, 2016. The same Russia-linked accounts retweeted candidate Hillary Clinton less than 50,000 times. – Twitter

In example you're out of the loop here, Twitter appeared before Congress for hearings on Russian efforts to utilise social media platforms to influence the U.Due south. presidential election. The company was joined by Google and Facebook equally well.

To establish if the business relationship was linked to Russia, Twitter said that information technology looked for accounts that were associated with a Russian phone carrier or Russian electronic mail address. In improver to that, it also looked if the user'south account proper name featured a meaning number of Cyrillic characters. And considering all these factors, the company managed to find 50,258 Russian-linked automated accounts that tweeted about the election.

Interestingly, many of these Russia-linked accounts were designed to look like they were run past existent Americans and had a huge post-obit as well. Lastly, Twitter too said, "there are technological limits to what nosotros can determine based on the information we tin detect regarding a user'south origin." So despite all this, information technology is worth making a notation that the extent of the impact of these automated influencing bots may never fully encounter the light of the day.