Russian election meddling in the U.S. and beyond

48 hours before the vote. The majority of the posts encouraged Britons to vote for Brexit. The authors believe the posts were seen hundreds of millions of times.

British media also reported on another study from the University of Edinburgh that identified 419 fake Twitter accounts operated by the St. Petersburg troll factory, which had tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times. Many of them also posted tweets aimed at fueling anti-Muslim sentiment in the United Kingdom.

The outcome of the Brexit referendum was met with triumphant notes from Alexey Pushkov, then Head of the Russian State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, who called the referendum result “Western voters’ revolt against the ruling system and traditional politicians”.

Pro-Kremlin accounts promoted Catalonian independence on social media, but on a smaller scale than was the case in the U.S.

On Russian state-controlled TV, the Catalonian referendum was accompanied with alarmist claims that Europe might “break up into small states”; that the world will “collapse”; that there was “a whiff of civil war”; that the Spanish authorities’ policies towards Catalonia were “suicidal”; that “Spain stands at the beginning of a real civil, not even conflict, but war” and that this was a result of “European liberal ideology.”

The French Presidential election was targeted by a cyber espionage group linked by some experts to the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

Russian media had systematically attacked President Macron when he was still a candidate; the attacks included references to conspiracy theories.

RT has also enforced Russian influence in France by setting up a French version of the TV channel in December 2017.

In Italy, RT broadcast misleading news from Rome when the Italians were about to go to the polls and vote about a constitutional reform.

In the Netherlands, Russia-linked trolls tried to influence the Dutch referendum on the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine with a fake video containing a terror threat against the Dutch.

Macedonians will vote