A lot of folks have cat3movieyelled at @Jenn_Abrams on Twitter, and that was the point.
Twitter users can no longer find @Jenn_Abrams on that social platform, because the account was removed after a congressional investigation revealed -- as reported by The Daily Beast-- this Abrams person was actually a troll account sent into the world by the Russian propaganda outfit known as the Internet Research Agency.
SEE ALSO: Russian Facebook trolls pushed for race-based violenceCreated in 2014, the folks behind the account spent some time sucking up followers with successfully viral tweets before swerving into right-wing politics in the lead-up to the United States presidential election in 2016. From there, the Abrams account incited angry political tweets.
The tweets of @Jenn_Abrams appeared in a slew of news outlets, as pointed out by The Daily Beast, including Mashable, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, CNN, and The New York Times.The Abrams on Twitter had a corresponding Medium account on which the trolls wrote a post called, “Why do we need to get back to segregation," which has since been removed.
Twitter recently revealed 2,752 accounts it says were operated by Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 election, to go along with 36,000 bots, though Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said the company "seems to be vastly underestimating the number of fake accounts and bots pushing disinformation."
Bots, while not as sophisticated as accounts like @Jenn_Abrams, do their own sort of damage.
These accounts are often designed to retweet the incendiary tweets of others or post headlines and links to purposefully inflammatory bullshit. Bots can signal boost topics on Twitter that real people would not otherwise care about.
Two juniors at the University of California, Berkeley recently built a Chrome extension that will allow Twitter users to press a button next to an account to determine whether that account is a bot. It's a step toward transparency, though not one Twitter's taken on its own.
Topics X/Twitter
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