To Disrupt America's 2020 Elections, Russian Internet Trolls Amplify Divisive Messages, Assemble 'Massive' Followings

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Russian internet trolls appear to be shifting strategy in their efforts to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections, promoting politically divisive messages through phony social media accounts instead of creating propaganda themselves, cybersecurity experts say. The Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency may be among those trying to circumvent protections put in place by companies including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to find and remove fake content that hackers created to sow division among the American electorate in the 2016 presidential campaign. 'Instead of creating content themselves, we see them amplifying content,' said John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at FireEye Inc. 'Then it's not necessarily inauthentic, and that creates an opportunity for them to hide behind somebody else.'
Other hackers are breaking into computing devices and using them to open large numbers of social media accounts, according to Candid Wueest, a senior threat researcher at Symantec Corp. The hacked devices are used to create many legitimate-looking users as well as believable followers and likes for those fake users... Wueest said he observed a decrease in the creation of new content by fake accounts from 2017 to 2018 and a shift toward building massive followings that could be used as platforms for divisive messages in 2020.
Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy responded that policing foreign influence campaigns is 'an incredibly hard balance' between the need to slow down bad actors while maintaining 'meaningful public discussion.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.