Putin’s Pro-Trump Trolls Just Targeted Hillary Clinton and Robert Mueller

Samantha Bradshaw and Lisa-Maria Neudert spoke to a Mother Jones for a story which drew on the project’s work on polarizing information in swing states.

“You can launch a disinformation campaign in the digital age and then all evidence of that campaign can just disappear,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher in Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, which found that battleground states were inundated with fake news and propaganda from Russian sources in the days before Trump was elected.

Facebook recently removed access to thousands of posts by Russian-controlled accounts analyzed independently by Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright. And while Albright told the Washington Post recently that those posts likely reached millions more than the 10 million people Facebook had originally estimated, Facebook is now set to tell Congress that Russian-linked content may have reached as many 126 million users. For its part, Google will testify that Russian agents uploaded more than 1,000 videos to YouTube.

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