Russian Twitter accounts started backing Trump almost immediately after his campaign announcement
By Hunter at Daily Kos
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/6/1713214/-Russian-Twitter-accounts-started-backing-Trump-almost-immediately-after-his-campaign-announcement
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Russian Twitter accounts posing as Americans began lavishing praise on Mr. Trump and attacking his rivals within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015, according to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal. [...]
In the three months after Mr. Trump announced his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015, tweets from Russian accounts reviewed by the Journal offered far more praise for the real-estate businessman than criticism—by nearly a 10-to-1 margin. At the same time, the accounts generally were hostile to Mrs. Clinton and the early GOP front-runner, Jeb Bush, by equal or greater margins.
That's an interesting bit of information, because it indicates that the Russian troll farms were much quicker to rally to Trump than has previously been supposed. U.S. intelligence services have previously supposed, at least in their public interpretations of events, that Russian efforts were focused merely on sowing discord during the elections, but only moved toward favoring Trump, specifically, late in the campaign. This muddies that theory a bit.
It wasn't a piecemeal effort, either:
Many political messages were sent out word-for word by multiple Russian-backed accounts, often within minutes of each other, suggesting a coordinated campaign.
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