Russian Twitter Accounts Promoted Brexit Ahead Of EU Referendum: Times Newspaper
Russian Twitter accounts posted almost 45,000 messages about Brexit in the 48 hours around last year’s referendum in an attempt to sow discord during the vote on whether to leave the European Union, the Times newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The Times cited research from an upcoming paper by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, which it said showed accounts based in Russia had tweeted about Brexit in the days leading up to the June 23 vote.
The Times said most of the tweets seen by the newspaper encouraged people to vote for Brexit, although a number advocated remaining in the EU. It quoted Tho Pham, one of the paper’s authors, as saying “the main conclusion is that bots were used on purpose and had influence”.
The research tracked 156,...