Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts (opens in new tab)

Small # of accounts, but massive amounts of followers/viewers. Kylie Jenner has a "fairly small amount of accounts" (ie one) on Twitter, but a single tweet can send a company's stock into the red[0].

0. http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technology/snapchat-update-k...

Yes, it is likely there are hundreds of thousands of accounts, not just a few dozen. Over time, we'll see. Twitter and all the rest have also come out with "it was just a few accounts, see, we've even gone and deleted them". But it's not that few.

Edit: Also, those few accounts pack a punch.

> 1.08 million users followed at least one of the Facebook Pages, and 493,000 users followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the start of 2015

That's a lot of influence and a fair bit of money spent on so few accounts. And across the whole Internet Research Agency as discussed by Facebook,

> 126 million people had seen the propaganda group’s Facebook posts and another 20 million had seen its Instagram posts.

Wow - that is a lot of people!

Thanks for this.

Reusing already-prominent acronyms gets really confusing although I know often it's unintentional.

Many Americans won't know who the IRA were/are, but in the UK (and probably the rest of Europe) it's common knowledge and burnt in.

I find amusing the "troll" label applied to it. Trolling in my books is someone taking the piss out of someone else or a situation. We're talking about far greater reach here with devastating impacts.

This is readily searchable, but here is an example:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/01/media/russian-facebook-ads-r...

> "We removed this latest set of Pages and accounts solely because they were controlled by the IRA — not based on the content.”

Does any of this content qualify as "fabricated news" ? Can you point out what you mean by that?

I disagree.....considering the political and "news" climate we live in today, "finding" and "shutting down" "Russian trolls" seems to me like an absolutely brilliant strategy to get the public and especially the media back on your side.

Excitement drives clicks, and Russia is the US's biggest boogey-man du jour (what happened to the pesky North Koreans and Muslims by the way, why don't we hear anything from them anymore?) that we need to government to protect us from, so this campaign should be a big winner I'd think.

It remains to be seen whether these scandals will have any real effect in the long run. Facebook grew to be a behemoth, now it seems almost "too big to fail".

People can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort.

So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.

Much of it seems to more be designed to sew discord between the parties than to directly influence the election.

Mission accomplished I guess.

None of that looks harmless to me. And also, buzzfeed-style posts are hardly harmless - I think you'd find a number of people who honestly believe that buzzfeed-style posts are a harbinger of the downfall of humanity. Regardless of any hyperbole, I do think "buzzfeed-style posts" are very harmful, and I while do think that these posts by Russian operatives can vaguely resemble buzzfeed-style posts, I think they are far more harmful.

Yeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?

Do you mean the individual retirement accounts? /s

What's a retirement plan got to do with this?