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The New York Times has used the indictment disclosures to chart the Russians’ manipulation of the Trump campaign via Facebook; the Daily Beast has reported that trolls also used Reddit and Tumblr; and NBC News has done substantial work to analyse the effects of troll Twitter accounts, including the ways they were unknowingly amplified by celebrities.
At least 1,062 more impugned Twitter accounts are yet to be released by the intelligence committee of the US House of Representatives, which disclosed 2,752 last November.
One of the great advantages of democratic systems over authoritarian ones is the democracies’ ability – through techniques such as independent journalism, public inquiries and litigation in independent courts – to detect, expose, learn lessons and make necessary change for the better.The bigger the dataset examined, the greater the collaboration among the organisations’ technical experts, and the more useful these exercises could be to professional journalism and the public. The most telling patterns are more likely to emerge through large-scale retrospective analysis of what took place and when.
If journalism institutions do more of this kind of work and prudently share their findings, their audiences become more aware of tactics that can distort elections. The effort dovetails with a fundamental aim of journalism over the centuries – a better informed electorate.
