Russian bots dropped 45,000 garbage tweets on us during the Brexit referendum

Reports of Russian trolls meddling into the U.S. elections are quite widespread, and even subject to a recent congressional investigation. 

Less well-known is Russia’s interference in the UK’s referendum on European Union membership in 2016. 

But now a paper — still incomplete — by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, is digging into the magnitude of Russian Brexit-related tweets — and the provisional results are astonishing. 

Russian accounts that normally tweet in Russian and whose main subject was the Ukrainian conflict swiftly switched to English ahead of the June 2016 referendum and dumped a staggering 45,000 tweets in 48 hours with the hashtag “#Brexit,” paper co-author Tho Pham told Mashable.  Read more…

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