[gabept]

> Facebook has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm and election interference squad the Internet Research Agency

This looks like a fairly small amount of accounts.

[hbosch]

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...

[dmix]

Don't these 'troll' accounts mostly have fake followers though? What reach could 76 accounts with mostly fake followers/likes really have on the world?

They most certainly arent anywhere near Kylie Jenner level so Im not sure what that has to do with this.

But I guess no one involved (media, FB) wants this story to be any less newsworthy so I doubt we'll ever have an answer...

[gabept]

Would you know of a single Russian account like that?

[cryptoz]

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!

[baursak]

Is there any specific reason you said hundreds of thousands of accounts, and not tens of thousands, millions, or dozens?

[cryptoz]

Just an order of magnitude guess. It could be tens of thousands, it could be millions, I'm just an outsider looking in. But it seems clear that it is at least a couple orders of magnitude more than just the 70 they found and publicized so far.

[patrickaljord]

This is not how it works. The goal of these accounts was to build a following to be able to influence more people. A page with a couple of hundreds likes or followers will have much more impact than a million accounts with no followers. Building audiences to influence people is hard and takes time. It is much more probable that there are around 70 accounts than millions. Sorry to be that blunt but do you know anything about this matter?

[wjn0]

Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't.

Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by the IRA?

[AnimalMuppet]

It seems to me intuitively obvious that an account with 10^4 followers has less influence than an account with 10^7 followers. (Sure, if you have 1000 accounts with 10^4 followers, it adds up...)

Removing the big accounts (probably) isn't going to remove the IRA's presence on Facebook. It's going to take a big chunk out of their influence, though. (Unless they have other accounts with big followings that weren't removed.)

[qaq]

They have different types of accounts for different purposes some are just used to comment or authenticate to 3d party sites and to comment there. They also serve as feeder accounts for the "core" accounts that are actually trying to build up followers.

[StanislavPetrov]

How dare you dismiss the possibility that there are billions or trillions of Russian accounts? Clearly you underestimate the limitless power of arch-villain Putin.