How Russian & Alt-Right Twitter Accounts Worked Together to Make #Antifa and #Berkeley Hot Topics [View all]

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How Russian & Alt-Right Twitter Accounts Worked Together to Skew the Narrative About Berkeley

____ Russian-linked influence networks and propaganda arms quickly took interest in the Berkeley protests last weekend. On Sunday afternoon, the top story on the front page of Russian propaganda outlet RT was about the events in Berkeley...

RT tweeted stories about the protests throughout the day Sunday (and some on Saturday), posting dramatic images and using trending hashtags to maximize their reach. Many of these tweets were retweeted by the semi-automated pro-Kremlin account @TeamTrumpRussia (aka Дepлorabлe Рuссian), which spent much of the day amplifying the hashtags #Berkeley and #Antifa.

On Twitter, the hashtag #Berkeley was amplified by Russian-linked influence networks, as evidenced by the output of the Hamilton 68 dashboard, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks the activity of 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. These include state-sponsored propaganda outlets like Sputnik and RT, as well as individual users, automated accounts (“bots”), and cyborgs (accounts that produce automated content some of the time, but are human-controlled at other times) that actively and frequently amplify Kremlin propaganda (knowingly, and in some cases, potentially unknowingly)...

But in a span of just four hours, the number of times the hashtag #Berkeley was used within the Russian-linked influence network increased by a staggering 27,600%, making it the top hashtag (measured by the number of times it was used) and the top trending hashtag (measured by the percentage increase in the frequency of use). As #Berkeley shot up to the top spot, the hashtag #Antifa also climbed the charts. Within the same four-hour window (4pm-8pm), #Antifa went from ninth place to sixth place among the most frequently used hashtags within the sample of 600 accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns.

read more: https://medium.com/@RVAwonk/how-russian-alt-right-twitter-accounts-worked-together-to-skew-the-narrative-about-berkeley-f03a3d04ac5d