Russia's efforts to sow misinformation on Twitter ahead of the 2016 US election was more extensive and professional than earlier believed, security researchers said Wednesday.
A report by the security firm Symantec said some of the accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency dated back as far as 2014 and that the manipulation effort involved a vast effort that included both automated "bots" and manual operations.
"While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that," said Gillian Cleary of Symantec's Security Technology and Response team in a blog post.
"It was planned months in advance and the operators had the resources to create and manage a vast disinformation network. It was a highly professional campaign." Twitter said the Symantec analysis was based on its data released to researchers last year of some 10 million tweets.
While the Russian campaign used Facebook and other channels, Twitter's data availability makes it easier for independent researchers to study these campaigns.
"Our singular focus is to improve the health of the public conversation on our platform, and protecting the integrity of elections is an important aspect of that mission," a Twitter spokesperson said.
"We've made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, which includes our release of data last fall related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation."
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content