Russia used 150,000 Twitter accounts to meddle in Brexit
16 Nov 2017 4:42 PM GMT
London: In a startling revelation, a group of data scientists has found 156,252 Russian accounts on Twitter which mentioned #Brexit and posted nearly 45,000 messages related to the EU referendum in the 48 hours around the vote.
According to a report in The Times on Thursday, "Russian Twitter accounts posted more than 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year's referendum in an apparently co-ordinated attempt to sow discord". According to data scientists from Swansea University in Wales and the University of California, Berkeley, over 150,000 Russian accounts who were posting about the Ukrainian conflict swiftly started tweeting about Brexit in days leading up to the 2016 vote. "From posting fewer than 1,000 tweets a day before June 13, the accounts -- many of which are virulently pro-Putin -- posted 39,000 tweets on June 23-24," the report said.
Tho Pham, one of the report authors, confirmed to TechCrunch that the majority of those Brexit tweets were posted on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote.
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