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Sunday Russian troll research: the conspiracy subsets of IRA tweets are gems. I'll do a proper write-up on All The Conspiracies soon but to bring my two favorite topics together: yes, Russian trolls masqueraded as antivax wingnuts, starting back in 2015. (Not tons; ~1000 tweets.)pic.twitter.com/4KyVXm061X
Back in 2015 they were writing their own stuff but they gradually seemed to switch over to amplified existing real wingnuts with RT's. To get the most interesting thing up top, most of the accounts that hit this topic were coded as RIGHT trolls in the @FiveThirtyEight data set.pic.twitter.com/bYQJQTTutG
This is interesting to me because back in 2015 we actively watched the antivax movement reach out to the Tea Party during the battle over the CA vax law; they tried to make it a "liberty" issue. The trolls did tweet about the law...mostly the newsbots.https://www.wired.com/2015/06/antivaxxers-influencing-legislation/ …
By 2017 their tweets had switched from vague vaccine fearmongering and vax law tweets to amplifying or writing more...exotic? conspiratorial content.pic.twitter.com/sdJSZ6ezJ4
And also some tweets that I believe are original? that tie vaccines to their favorite topic: racial discord. There was an article written about that on now-defunct site ReportSecret; looking for cached copy... http://www.reportsecret.com/SbRSZ/2017/09/diseases-expert-calls-for-white.html …pic.twitter.com/wfQy7VAhLZ
And, of course, some free promotion for Andy Wakefield's shit documentary, which generated some controversy when it came out.pic.twitter.com/NUfprM5UDQ
The ~200 or so Newsbot tweets just reported the news: Trump's vax council, Chris Christie saying he vaccinates, some vax law stories, some patent stories. There was a small minority of pro-vax tweets in the mix, here are a few (they mention kids- some here are still anti).pic.twitter.com/C0MR3AlNhW
Anyway, there are definitely automated accounts continuing to participate in many of the pseudoscience conspiracy conversations. It's not just an IRA thing, but I thought other people might be interested in seeing these. More later, the kiddo is up...
Thanks for this research. We in Canada need to brace ourselves for the onslaught from Russia.
you can go back to 2009 .... Tea Party trolls
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