[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.)

[tzs]

I'd expect IRA (or whomever) to use both types of accounts. They can work together.

I'd expect the 10^7 follower account to indeed have more influence, but not necessarily be able to effectively use that influence as well as the 10^4 follower account.

The big follower accounts would probably tend to be more general, with more diversity among their followers. For example they might have followers spread throughout the nation. Much of their influence will be wasted influencing people in areas where changing a few opinions is not enough to make a difference.

The smaller accounts might be able to be more focused on one particular region and one particular group of potential voters in that region. They will align with that group better than the big, national account will, and so might be more likely to change positions of their followers, and they can be focused on a region where things are close.

So what you do is use your big accounts as sources, and use your small accounts to post things from the big accounts. The link to the big accounts lends credibility to the material in the eyes of your followers on the smaller accounts.

[AnimalMuppet]

That's all true. I especially like your last paragraph about the smaller accounts borrowing prestige from the big accounts.

But it seems to me that the amount of effort required to run an account does not scale with the number of followers. Sleeper accounts are essentially free, of course, but an account with 10^7 followers is not 1000 times harder to run than an account with 10^4 followers. Unless they have a lot more people devoted to the smaller accounts, they probably don't have 1000 times as many accounts with 10^4 followers.

[bitumen]

You know the old saw, “quantity has a quality all of its own.” I’d add that these guys could have done both. They could have high follower count identities, medium, and low. They can have highly active accounts, and “sleepers” and everything in between. It would be unwise to make too many assumptions based on limited press releases from Facebook. It’s more sensible to think about what they could have done, and then move on from there.

They could have had tiers of accounts, all for different purposes. They could have used a ton of low accounts to simulate a grassroots response, to openly troll and be banned, and all kinds of things. They’d have cultivated more and less popular, and obvious accounts as well. If they were smart they’d have a whole layer of accounts designed just to be caught, and give a misleading impression of their competence and methodology.

[wjn0]

You expressed my thoughts better than I could. I'm looking forward to more analysis being done on the actions of IRA - I just hope FB/Twitter/others don't sweep what was done beyond these big accounts under the rug, because we're only going to see more of this sort of "information warfare."

[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.