US security services blame Russian Internet trolls for Trump's victory

From June 2015 to May 2017, as many as 470 unreliable accounts and pages paid for advertising messages about 100,000 dollars, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said.

According to him, those accounts bought about 3,000 advertising messages on social and political issues, from LGBT people to migrants and gun rights. Facebook believes that those accounts are related to Russia and attempted to show influence on the American political system.

In many of those cases, advertising messages were not related to US presidential candidates, but they were called to split the Americans, reports CNN.

As representatives of the social network said, the names of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were mentioned in some of those messages. The messages that were not related to the subject of elections touched upon controversial issues, such as the rights of LGBT people, the right to own weapons and other moot questions.

They may have not either helped or harmed any of the candidates, but they involved them in heated discussions during the election campaign.

Pravda.Ru asked an expert opinion on the subject from ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev.

"If they say that Russian "trolls" or Russian companies affected the outcome of the vote, then they make an absolutely unproven statement. Those are just words and nothing else. It is impossible to change a person's opinion with the help of Internet "trolls." I do not believe that people can change their minds and vote for Donald Trump just because some "trolls" were saying something in the comments. Electors are free to receive information and they have a variety of opportunities for it to come to their own conclusions and make their own decisions. Claiming that Internet "trolls" exerted influence on the outcome of the US presidential election is absurd."

Pravda.Ru

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