Russia-linked bots retweeted Trump 470,000 times during US election, Twitter says

More facts have continued to emerge about Moscow’s influence in the last US election after Twitter revealed that Russia linked bots retweeted Trump 470,000 times during the final months of the 2016 election.

The automated accounts retweeted the Republican candidate’s @realDonaldTrump posts almost 470,000 times, accounting for just more than 4 percent of the re-tweets he received from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016.

Hillary Clinton’s account got less than 50,000 retweets by the Russian-linked automated accounts during the same period of time, the company said in documents posted Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Read also: Humans will have a ‘robot second self’ in 20 years, Microsoft experts claim

The information further underscores how Russian-linked accounts sought to stir up discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Congress has been investigating exactly how social-media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube were manipulated during the election.

The documents are Twitter’s response to follow-up questions from the Senate committee following an Oct. 31 hearing on the issue of Russian infiltration of the media platforms.

 

 

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