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The study found that every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm led by an oligarch close to President Putin, predicted a 1% increase in opinion polls for President Trump.
Given that the election turned on 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, "it is a prospect that should be taken seriously," Ruck wrote, adding that more study was needed in those swing states.
"It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump's polling numbers than his own Twitter activity," he wrote. 
Coordinated amplification ➡️ The IRA's basic strategy, Symantec found, was to use a small core of Twitter accounts to push out new content. And they harnessed a wider pool of automated accounts to amplify those messages.
Weaponized ➡️ "We also see that 91 percent of first retweeters of IRA tweets were non-IRA bots," the Tennessee study says, "which suggests that propaganda spread into networks of real U.S. citizens."
