The Russian troll farm credited with Donald Trump’s election victory is back, US researchers say

Russian bots and trolls blamed for former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory have returned to US social media platforms, focusing their attacks that sow discord and promote disinformation on alternative networks like Gab and Parler, researchers from bot hunting teams Recorded Future, Mandiant and Graphika warned the New York Times on Sunday.

Questionable accounts believed to be linked to the Russian”troll farmThe Internet Research Agency is targeting conservatives ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, researchers said, tackling familiar topics like voter fraud, Democrats’ perceived leniency on crime, the administration’s blank check to Ukraine , transgender children and other hot topics.

Investigators acknowledged that any influence campaign waged on the former president’s Gab, Gettr or Truth Social is necessarily much smaller than the 2016 IRA Facebook campaign, and admitted some of the content “did not spread virally to other platforms.” A Gab account held up as an example of an IRA personality resurfacing to meddle in midterms had just 8,000 followers, with one post receiving just 43 replies.

However, they argued that less effort was needed to sow discord than in previous elections. “Since 2016, it seems that foreign states can afford to take their foot off the gas a bit, because they have already created so much division that there are many national actors to bring them the water of disinformation.Twitter executive turned election security expert Edward Perez told the Times.

Researchers like Graphika’s Ben Nimmo claimed after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory that a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook advertising by the IRA played a critical role in convincing hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose faith in the democratic process. . The narrative of “Russian bots threatening the voting processit has resurfaced with every American election, and with many foreign contests, since.

However, even Graphika acknowledged in September that hundreds of fake Pentagon-operated accounts had been spreading pro-U.S. narratives. Facebook staff apparently told government officials they were concerned foreign adversaries might expose it.

On Wednesday, the family of racially motivated mass shooting victim Clementa Pinckney sued Facebook’s parent Meta, the IRA and the latter’s alleged main financier, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s associate Yevgeny Prighozin, for supposedly allow theonline radicalization” of Pinckney’s killer, Dylann Roof. The social media giant should have known the IRA was “actively and deliberately radicalizing susceptible users online”, states the lawsuit.

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