@drewharwell @JosephMenn yeah though 1) adversary boasting and 2) they may be counting their inflater accounts - the stuff they use to boost. We see, for example, 30k accounts deployed to "Like" a new page. Most look like Indonesian click farm type stuff, not sophisticated personas. Grains of salt.

@Noupside @drewharwell @JosephMenn That's interesting. Could you say more about why you don't think it's a big deal? I thought what the article was saying was that the Russians have been extremely successful in manipulating search ranking, trending, and recommender algorithms -- effectively getting massive free advertising, flooding the zone with propaganda, and making information on the internet less accessible and useful -- using fake crowds faking popularity. That's a big deal, isn't it?

@glinden @drewharwell @JosephMenn maybe too much for a reply but: there are a couple things here. first is, do they get attention - mass boosting does not necessarily translate into showing up in recommenders, this varies a lot depending on platform. Twitter in its current trash state may no longer be using "low quality account" assessments, who knows, but prev we've seen networks where content got little authentic engagement - all of the Likes, etc, were from other members of the network.