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The Russian Trolls

The news is everywhere:

Russian Hacking and Influence in the US Election
Cardin: Russia’s election meddling is ‘an act of war’
Russia’s election posts reached 126 million people, Facebook will tell …
Russia hackers had targets worldwide, beyond US election
Russia hackers pursued Putin foes, not just US Democrats
Russian election meddling: Should tech giants have …

Purpotedly most of this targeted influence was orchestrated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

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The trolls’ reported St Petersburg lair. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Reviewing these articles reveals that there are at least several different ways that social media meddling has occurred.  Another issues is how do we measure the actual influence that these post have had on the public.

How would you know that it was a computer that was spreading viral fake news

 

 

Reference Articles

  1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america?utm_term=.up6lgBovDz#.xyRvMd30LR
  2. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0

How Big is the Internet

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Visualization of the Internet – zbynek krulich

3.74 billion Internet users in the world as at March 2017.

Asia accounts for 50.1 percent of all Internet users in the world. The runner up is Europe, with 17 percent of all Internet users.

China accounts for more than 25 percent of internet users.

Over 2 million blog posts are published on the Internet every day.

There are over 330.6 million registered domain names as at the first quarter of 2017

There are 1.24 billion websites in the world.

With over 58 percent market share and about 20.6 million active sites, WordPress is the world’s number one CMS.

There are 2.79 billion active social media users in the world.