I worked briefly last year on checking Twitter attacks on Hillary Clinton. What I learned did shock me.
1) The absolute worst, most vile and crude attacks on Clinton (and me) were from Bernie supporters. Not Trump people. They were often assholes, but not in the same way.
2) Of those Bernie supporters, a good number — hard to estimate now — were of Russian origin. (I’m not going to tell you how I knew, because I don’t want to tip them off for further training.)
How does a fake account influence an election? Easy. When enough people retweet you, they think what you say is true. There was this one account (Jeannette Sandernista) who was everywhere, and she/it pumped out misinformation at a volume no one could keep up with. (I know. I tried.) It was approvingly retweeted by thousands. (She/it closed the account right after the election.)
It’s hard to rebut on Twitter, because it’s really easy to smear someone in 140 characters. It’s a lot harder to explain anything nuanced, and that’s what the bots counted on. They were very good at what they did.
It’s important to understand that anyone can be taken in by this stuff. If you’re not a professional, and you see what appears to be a news story on Facebook (it has was appears to be a legitimate URL), you’d have to be suspicious enough to questions it. Most people aren’t.
What disturbs me the most is that I’m still seeing the same false stories about Clinton today that I saw a year ago — not only from Trump supporters, but Democrats. (Like the Russian uranium story.) That means at least some people still believe it, and that depresses the hell out of me.
Rachel Maddow did a really good segment about this, and used this WAPO article as her underpinning. Fascinating, really scary stuff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/01/18/russias-radical-new-strategy-for-information-warfare/?utm_term=.1d140b7b0729
A tweeter can be a Russian troll, or he/she can be an American Bernie supporter, but you cannot have it both ways and complain about Russian Bernie tweeters.
Silly me… when the level of bullshit just got to be unbearable, I quit looking at Facebook and Twitter. Which really did improve the quality of my life.