How Russian Trolls Tried to Influence Ohioans using Twitter

From the Columbus Dispatch. I will cross post in General Discussion.

This is disgusting and infuriating. Wait till you read these headlines. And this complete BS was believed by many!

******

Ohio is roughly tied with fellow swing-state Florida for fourth place in the number of mentions by Twitter handles associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Although Twitter deleted those accounts, a full array of those tweets is now visible to the public for the first time.

The nonprofit news statistics site FiveThirtyEight obtained 2,973,371 tweets from 2,848 Twitter handles associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency from June 19, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2017. The data were dug up by Clemson University Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social-media tracking software, the professors extracted the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter connected to the Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg. (“Troll” accounts are operated by humans, as opposed to “bots” accounts run by computer.)

FiveThirtyEight downloaded them to a GitHub site, from which The Dispatch downloaded the 6,669 tweets containing “Ohio” to see how the Russian government attempted to influence the state, which is typically a presidential bellwether.

Ohio is roughly tied with fellow swing-state Florida for fourth place in the number of mentions.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that Ohio is No. 4,” Linvill said. “If anything, I would have guessed you would be a little higher.”

More:

http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180811/heres-how-russian-trolls-tried-to-influence-ohioans-using-twitter