Thread by @benimmo

Meanwhile, on the +other+ troll farm, I did a sample scan of who the Russian troll accounts retweeted most often, and which websites they linked to.

@DFRLab
medium.com/dfrlab/trolltr…

Presidential candidate most often retweeted by the Russian troll accounts?

Donald Trump, retweeted almost 4,000 times, chiefly in late 2016 and early 2017.

By comparison:

Ted Cruz 196 retweets
Jeb Bush 13 retweets

Including this one, retweeted by @cassishere.

https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/776881511664611329

Intriguingly, the Russian troll accounts retweeted Hillary Clinton 250 times.

Mostly in Q2 2015, when she launched her bid, and Q4 2016.

Here's the fun part. Look who the Russian trolls retweeted among commentators and media.

Top billing: PrisonPlanet, Posobiec, Hannity, Cernovich.

A lot of those retweets came from one account, @CovfefeNationUS.

But compare that with retweets of Jake Tapper and @maddow.

This was an especially interesting exchange to show the way the Russian troll accounts infiltrated US communities.

@TEN_GOP retweeted this quote by Jack Posobiec of a tweet by @TEN_GOP.

Welcome to the feedback loop.

archive.is/XfOCF

(Proof that @TEN_GOP retweeted it, from the Twitter archive of troll farm posts.)

It's interesting to see how the later trolls stayed in character, even when posting on Russian issues.

This was @AmelieBaldwin retweeting @Maddow on the Senate hearings and Trump.

The trolls read widely, and shared widely, to stay in character, too.

As last night's indictment said, they picked their outlets to suit their targets.

lawfareblog.com/document-justi…

Here's a graph of the links the troll accounts shared to different outlets in English.

Shares of Russian links, especially riafan.ru (a troll farm product) and RT Russian, were 20 times higher or more. Remember the troll farm targeted Russians first.

Interesting to note that the top three were Fox, RT and Breitbart.

About 10k shares between them (sometimes multiple troll accounts shared the same URL, so this doesn't equate to number of articles shared).

They shared @washingtonpost substantially, but many of those shares came from a single account, @washingtonline, and it also shared the Washington Times and NBC Washington.

Local colour.

If you exclude RT and focus on the US outlets, here are the numbers:

Fox + Breitbart + GatewayPundit + Infowars + ZeroHedge = 10,244 shares

WaPo + CNN + NYT + WSJ = 6,725 shares.

A lot of this was personal. Many of the shares of Infowars came as retweets of Alex Jones, for example.

We know the troll farm's accounts shared influential U.S. voices heavily. Here's a take from @lukeobrien on @TEN_GOP's interactions with key voices.

Source: huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/twitter-…

This was an infiltration operation. As yesterday's indictment showed, sharing and retweeting were a way of getting inside communities on both sides of the spectrum to "aggravate the conflict" between them.