Russian Troll Farms Boosted Trump’s 2016 Poll Numbers

The Hill reports:

The Russian troll farms that carried out a sophisticated disinformation campaign on U.S. social media platforms in 2016 may have influenced President Trump’s standing in public opinion polls during the campaign, according to a new study released Monday.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee said that for every 25,000 retweets each week by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Trump’s poll numbers would gain an increase of about 1 percent.

“We find that changes in opinion poll numbers for one of the candidates were consistently preceded by corresponding changes in IRA re-tweet volume, at an optimum interval of one week before,” the researchers wrote