Did Trump get Support from Fake Russian Twitter users?
It shouldn’t be considered shocking news that Russia-backed Twitter accounts attempted to control U.S voters in the U.S Presidential Election 2016. The Wall Street Journal also published analysis which indicated that Russian Twitter accounts initiated promoting Donald Trump just after a few of weeks of his announcement as the Republican candidate for the U.S Presidency in 2015, but not in the month of December 2015 as mentioned in the election report by the U.S intelligence community. Moreover, it started building up praise on Trump. Most of the early posts blamed the Republicans Jeb Bush and Democrats Hillary Clinton. Point to be noted that a handsome amount of support for Trump was clear at that stage and there was approximately 10-1 ratio of praise to criticism among the bogus accounts, a figure that might climb to 30 to 1 when the U.S Presidential election was just 2 weeks away.
Most identical messages normally showed up within a couple of minutes with hinting at very tight coordination. Some specific posts that weren’t perfect to pattern traditionally just came from accounts that were molded on manipulating social tensions, including secession movement of Texas and Black Lives Matter protests. Some of these accounts got a significant amount of attention. A specific account for a fake conservative Texan woman collected at least 70 thousand followers, including Lt. Gen Michael Flyn and Sean Hannity. The WSJ has warned that its capability is limited to measure the full timeline and it is very difficult to go back and see every post, as Twitter removes tweets the moment it suspends an account. It is important that the findings suggest, social influence campaign of Russia favored Trump right from the beginning.