Russian
bots dropped 45,000 garbage tweets on us
during the
Brexit referendum
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Reports of
Russian trolls meddling into the U.S. elections are quite widespread, and even subject to a
recent congressional investigation.*
SEE ALSO:
Russian ministry of defense tweets video game screenshot to accuse U.S. of cooperating with ISIS
Less well-known is Russia's interference in the UK's
referendum on European Union membership in 2016.*
But now a paper — still incomplete — by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, is digging into the magnitude of
Russian Brexit-related
tweets — and the provisional results are astonishing.*
Russian accounts that normally tweet in
Russian and whose main subject was the Ukrainian conflict swiftly switched to English ahead of the June 2016
referendum and dumped a staggering
45,000 tweets in 48 hours with the hashtag “#Brexit,” paper co-author Tho Pham told
Mashable.*
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More about
Russia,
Brexit,
Theresa May,
Twitter Bots, and
Brexit Referendum