[varjag]

> The problem was that they got attention. I still dispute any relevant impact besides the talking points for political campaigns. Which rivals and probably exceeds the dishonesty of some trolls.

Can't judge the impact, but there is no question of their ubiquity. The bulk of these laura freedoms, vets for tumps, deplorable sandys and similar accounts with hundreds of thousands tweets are Russian operators. Often you'd look at their likes, and their full of Cyrillc tweets they had to amplify for the Motherland due to some minute home front need. Sometimes, I'd tweet them a humiliating comment in Russian that Bing would never be able to translate, and get blocked within seconds.

Twitter today is likely close to 50% accounts being bots, and 80% content generated/circulated by bots. They also have everything they need to shut the bots down, but it will halve their user base and likely reduce engagement metrics to 1/10th.