It seems like Twitter struggles with all aspects except appealing to millennials and our President. Their stock never does particularly well and many generations are not very happy with Twitter. Social media, and Twitter especially, were manipulated in the 2016 election and it is funny to see that the president elected loves Twitter. Recently, Twitter admitted to finding 1,062 more Russian infiltrated propaganda accounts, 3,814 total accounts now to be exact.
The Russian government has backed many accounts for propaganda purposes to spread fake news and political division among Americans. Twitter has said that it expects a minimum of 50,000 Russian related accounts to have been created to sway Americans in the past presidential election. The Kremlin also created 13,512 bot accounts with their only agenda to tweet fake news to trick Americans. They had posed as Trump supporters and attacked the anti-Trump supporters on Twitter.
In this new age of technology, it is interesting to see how social media will manipulate our elections and other important American events. Hopefully the main social media companies will be able to protect our Americans from other countries’ negative agendas. The Russians need to be reprimanded for the dirty work they did in the 2016 presidential election. Twitter needs to step up in 2020 if they want to stay relevant.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-reveals-1-000-more-accounts-tied-to-russian-propaganda-agency-1516414856
http://socialbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Twitter-and-russia.jpg
Twitter Bots have been around for a fairly long time and until this election cycle, they seemed pretty harmless. These Russian bots not only attempted (succeeded?) to divide the American public, but also tried to suspend real people’s accounts on Twitter. In this article I read, a man was kicked off Twitter because too many bots followed him at once. Twitter rules ban that sort of vast following spree, but instead of taking down the bots, they take down the original poster. That may not seem too nefarious, but the bots could potentially start blocking the voice of those that disagree with them.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/01/twitter-has-a-big-bot-problem/