Bots push two-year-old story on Obama and Russia all the way to the top of today's Drudge Report

TRAVIS GETTYS
29 MAY 2017 AT 12:44 ET



A two-year-old report on “Obama’s secret outreach to Russia” hit the top spot on the conservative Drudge Report after hundreds of bot accounts flooded Twitter with links to the article.

The report published Dec. 31, 2014, by Bloomberg View outlines the Obama administration’s behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to improve relations with Russia, which were spearheaded by then-Secretary of State John Kerry and included input from several Cabinet-level agencies.

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The original Bloomberg report largely disappeared from Twitter after interest died down a few weeks after its publication, but it began recirculating over the weekend.

Two posts appeared to have been shared directly from the Bloomberg site early Saturday morning and Sunday evening, but then a deluge of posts using the same phrasing and tags burst forth starting at 12:48 a.m. and continuing every two or three minutes for the next 11 hours.

Many of those accounts, at least in the early hours of the social media push, display the distinctive traits of bots — with highly unbalanced posting-to-followers ratios, inscrutable account names, few public interactions and almost no original content phrasing.

The report gained traction later in the morning, as the report found its way into more apparently human accounts.

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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/bots-push-two-year-old-story-on-obama-and-russia-all-the-way-to-the-top-of-todays-drudge-report/