Russian Trolls Earned Big Ad Bucks With 2016 Meddling

NBC News reports:

The effort by a Russian internet deception factory to manipulate American public opinion during the 2016 election was better planned and executed — and also more lucrative — than previously understood, according to a new analysis of nearly 10 million tweets by a leading cybersecurity firm.

The operation by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency amounted to “a vast, coordinated campaign that was incredibly successful at pushing out and amplifying its messages,” according to Symantec, which conducted an in-depth analysts of nearly 4,000 Twitter accounts involved in what U.S. intelligence agencies assess was a Russian-government–sponsored propaganda operation designed in part to help Donald Trump get elected president.

Some of the accounts were set up months in advance. And some of the trolls used their fake accounts to make money on the side, the researchers found, with one potentially generating nearly $1 million.