https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia...an-right-after-he-started-campaign-1509964380
Russian Twitter Support for Trump Began Right After He Started Campaign
In three months after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy, tweets from Russian accounts offered far more praise for the businessman than criticism
A staff member arranges a display showing a social-media post during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Nov. 1 in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
By
Mark Maremont and
Rob Barry
Nov. 6, 2017 5:33 a.m. ET
Kremlin-backed support for Donald Trump's candidacy over social media began much earlier than previously known, a new analysis of Twitter data shows.
Russian Twitter accounts posing as Americans began lavishing praise on Mr. Trump and attacking his rivals within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015, according to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal.
A U.S. intelligence assessment released early this year concluded the Kremlin developed a "clear preference" for Mr. Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, but cited December 2015 as the earliest suspected time that Russian social-media accounts advocated for Mr. Trump.
The earlier starting point of pro-Trump tweets highlights the breadth of the Russian effort to manipulate social media during the 2016 election. Kremlin-paid actors sowed division among Americans with fake pages and accounts, inflammatory postings and thousands of paid ads aimed at both liberal and conservative audiences, according to testimony before Congress last week.
The Journal analyzed 159,000 deleted tweets from accounts that Twitter identified to congressional investigators as operated by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency.
Twitter said it has suspended all 2,752 of the accounts, which removes their tweets from its platform. Congress released the names of the accounts on Nov. 1, during hearings on Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
In the three months after Mr. Trump announced his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015, tweets from Russian accounts reviewed by the Journal offered far more praise for the real-estate businessman than criticism—by nearly a 10-to-1 margin. At the same time, the accounts generally were hostile to Mrs. Clinton and the early GOP front-runner, Jeb Bush, by equal or greater margins.
The Journal pieced together the deleted tweets from data it has collected as well as that provided to the Journal by several researchers. The records contain at least one tweet from more than 2,000 of the accounts.
