Internet Research Agency? (IRA)

[ArthurBrown]

What does the research reveal about Russian dis-information?
What is the Internet Research Agency? (IRA)

Let’s start with some facts- last week the U.S published its intelligence committee research on the on-going Russian cyber warfare campaign. This campaign uses social media to create false stories and highly contentious material to create discord.
Tweets and social media posts created and shared by IRA operatives posing as users was listed in the report and numbers were counted.
The Group made 61,500 Facebook posts
116,000 Instagram posts and 10.4 million tweets all aimed at sewing disruption + inflaming tensions among Americans says the report. The IRA aggressively targeted and attacked African Americans- 95% of the content uploaded on ‘YouTube’ was focused on racial issues and police brutality. The report shows this activity actually increased after the 2016 election.
Russian media interference undermines faith in democracy and continues to attempt to divide the U.S by inflaming cultural / political/ social tensions and remains active today. This has implications for the United Kingdom too. Social platforms should show more transparency with its users. It should inform users where the content has come from + users should be informed about manipulated content.
Strategies for collaboration and protection of users and the integrity of content are needed. Twitter has the first largest archive of content that has been removed from its platform and ‘facebook’ is now attempting to create strong defences to identify the threat of completely fictitious content and the danger it poses. This article is about the U.S situation, but the same is probably true in the U.K too. Take time to verify any content you read with a new heightened awareness that it could be total bullshit Government bullshit, or only Russian State bullshit!