Russian Trolls Amped Up Tweets for Pro-Trump Website's Content

Russia’s social-media trolling operation began stepping up its Twitter presence to new heights in late July 2017 -- more than eight months after sowing discord and disinformation in the 2016 presidential election. The burst of activity -- revealed in a new, comprehensive dataset of nearly 3 million tweets -- had an overriding focus over the ensuing three months: popularizing headlines and news stories that were originally authored by a US-based news site called Truthfeed that supports President Donald Trump and specializes in hyper-partisan, factually incorrect stories.

By Oct. 22, 2017, just hours before Twitter closed nearly all of the known accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency’s troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia, Truthfeed content accounted for about 95 percent of the accounts’ English-language activity, the dataset shows. Special counsel Robert Mueller in February indicted the Russian agency and 13 individuals on charges of interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. There’s no evidence that Truthfeed’s staff members were aware of the Russian tweeting. Each tweet pointed to a separate, now-defunct website that was republishing more than 50 Truthfeed stories a day. That site, called ReportSecret.com, appears to have been connected to the troll-farm operation.