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Check your email to see if you got duped by a Russian Twitter bot during the 2016 election

By Mike Murphy
Published

Twitter announced today, Jan. 19, that some 677,775 people in the US saw tweets connected to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian propaganda effort with ties to the Kremlin, during the 2016 US election. If you want to know if you were among those who saw these generally anti-Democrat or conservative tweets, just check your email.

In a blog post, Twitter said it sent out emails to its affected users. Twitter said that engagement with these sorts of tweets had generally been low, but it provided a few handy screenshots of examples of those that had “significant engagement,” including these gems:

Twitter added that it had uncovered a total of 3,814 IRA-associated accounts, which sent out over 175,000 tweets during the 10 weeks before the election. Only about 8% of those tweets were actually related to the election. Its total tally for automated Russian-linked troll accounts tweeting during that period now stands at 50,258.

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