This is excellent work and is scary as hell. It would appear that, just as many of us feared, we’ve been raped, pillaged, and burned politically by a highly leveraged set of botnets manipulating twitter and other social media. I’ve thought about this for a day or so now, since first reading this, and it only gets worse. While I understand the limits of your research at this point and the difficulty of drawing any totally clear conclusions but I’m left with no other word than evil. The scale of the cross linking of sites with swarms of generated tweets and sophistication of the generated fake twitter accounts obviously was able to shift opinion for targeted audiences almost at will. Are there any traceable links to Cambridge Analytica?

I’m now haunted by the ease with which this has been used to generate confusion and distrust of actual information. The continous mix of conspiracy theories being shotgunned out with this crates a world of craziness heightened by the use of “true information” as an attack on mainstream media attacking these propaganda mills. I would say the majority of our population will not be able to understand this let alone determine the validity of anything they get now. And the use of these sites and networks, as you noted, at times apparently going to the highest bidder amplifies the sense of confusion and distrust which is the classic political goal.