A day after the deadly school shooting in South Florida, Twitter saw a spike in tweets about gun violence from Russian-linked accounts.
Hamilton 68, a website that tracks Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns, identified trending hashtags and topics on Thursday, including Parkland, guncontrolnow, Florida and guncontrol, as well as Nikolas – the name of the accused shooter – Wired reported.
Another website run by RoBhat Labs, Botcheck.me, which tracks political propaganda bots, found that all of the top two-word phrase used on Twitter in the day after the shooting, excluding President Trump’s name, had to do with the attack, according to Wired.
Botcheck.me does not only track bots linked to Russian influence campaigns, and Ash Bhat, one of the project’s founders, told Wired that he would not speculate who is operating the accounts that his website tracks.
According to Wired, some bot operators create hashtags and push them until their picked up by human users. Other bots seize on hashtags already in use to try to hijack the conversation.
The findings came a day after a shooter opened fire on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. on Wednesday, killing 17 people.
The accused shooter was identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, a former student at the school who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons. He was charged Thursday with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Such shootings often give way to intense debate over gun control, a fiercely divisive political issue.
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Russian bots flood twitter with pro-gun messages after Florida shooting: report https://t.co/JNbADlFcNY pic.twitter.com/9uyLtAZReE
— The Hill (@thehill) February 16, 2018
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