Exclusive: Russia Woke Up Twitter Sleeper Cells for Election Day Blitz

https://amp.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russia-activated-twitter-sleeper-cells-for-election-day-blitz

Russia Woke Up Twitter Sleeper Cells for Election Day Blitz
KEVIN POULSEN
11.07.17 7:30 PM ET

As U.S. polling places opened last Nov. 8, Russian trolls in St. Petersburg began a final push on Twitter to elect Donald Trump.

They used a combination of high-profile accounts with large and influential followings, and scores of lurking personas established years earlier with stolen photos and fabricated backgrounds. Those sleeper accounts dished out carefully metered tweets and retweets voicing praise for Trump and contempt for his opponent, from the early morning until the last polls closed in the United States.

“VOTE TRUMP to save ourselves from the New World Order. Time to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” read one. “Last chance to stop the Queen of Darkness! Vote Trump!” urged another.

The Daily Beast analyzed a dataset of 6.5 million tweets containing election keywords like “Hillary” and “Trump” that was collected over 33 hours last Nov. 7-9 by Baltimore-based data scientist Chris Albon

By filtering for the 2,752 users identified by Twitter as Russian troll accounts—a list the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released last week—we isolated 80 accounts dishing Election Day agitprop and reconstructed the big finish to Russia’s months-long active measures
campaign.

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