“Russian trolls” used American startups to interfere in the US elections

Russian interference in the 2016 US election was not only linked to Facebook and Twitter. Employees of the Internet Research Agency Yevgeny Prigozhin also used the services of American startups, writes Bloomberg.

Details

• published by Twitter Hundreds of accounts linked to the Russian “troll factory” have been spreading their provocative messages through the services of technology startups IFTTT, RoundTeam and Dlvr.it, according to data .
• The IFTTT service allows you to automatically publish content on multiple platforms, send it to mail and instant messengers, etc. He was associated with 256 of the more than 4,600 accounts published in the archive of the social network. Now they have all been removed, the company said. In total, the platform has more than 15 million users. The startup is "actively investigating the data released by Twitter and intends to take serious action to prevent such abuse," said co-founder Linden Tibbets.
• The trolls used IFTTT frequently late last year and early this year. Distributing content through it, they attached to it a link to other sites and blogs, most of which were moved or deleted, according to Twitter data. Most likely, with the help of the platform, the trolls tried to hide the source of information, according to Ben Nimmo, an employee of the Digital Forensic Research Lab. “This attempt to cover their tracks was largely made to bypass Twitter algorithms,” the expert says.
• RoundTeam, which automates the search and distribution of tweets, and Dlvr.it, which provides a service for distributing content on social networks, did not respond to Bloomberg inquiries.

Context

• An archive of all the tweets that are associated in the United States with the activities of the Russian “troll factory” of Yevgeny Prigozhin was uploaded by Twitter on October 17. The volume of text data was 1.24 gigabytes. The archive contains over 9 million tweets published between 2013 and 2018. The entries are associated with 3.8 thousand Twitter accounts. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab analyzed all this information and presented its own study on this matter. We wrote about the main conclusions of the experts here .
• On March 15, 2018, the US Treasury published a sanctions list that included 19 Russians and 5 organizations that allegedly interfered in the US elections. Sanctions included, in particular, the Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory”. Most of those who were sanctioned worked for this company (you can read more about who these people are here ). Five Russians from the new list, including businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, as well as two of his other companies (Concord Management and Concord Catering), the FSB of Russia and the GRU have already been sanctioned earlier.
• On Friday, the US authorities made two statements at once accusing Russia of interfering in the upcoming US elections. First, the US Department of Justice accused a Russian woman working for a company associated with businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin of organizing attempts to interfere in the 2018 US midterm elections to the US Congress. In addition, the US Department of Justice, the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement, which suggests that Russia is interfering not only in the 2018 Congressional elections, but also in the 2020 presidential elections. We wrote more about this here .

Liana Faizova