How Russian trolls are trying to go viral on X
In November 2022, after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk joked to his millions of followers: “Wait, if I Tweet does that count as work?" An account secretly run by a Russian intelligence agency tried for a humorous reply: “Your boss will be angry." The awkward joke got zero likes. Russian trolls are ramping up their efforts again on social media ahead of another U.S. presidential election, and they seem desperate for influencers to notice them.
Amid elevated fears of foreign election meddling, the exchange offered an early example of a shift toward relying more on low-quality, high-volume spam tactics that experts and officials say could escalate on social-media platforms in the coming months. Since 2022, a Russian network of fake personas on the social-media platform now called X sought to interact with billionaire and X Corp. owner Musk and conservative political and media figures including Donald Trump Jr.and Tucker Carlson, pushing divisive content and narratives that sought to weaken international support for Ukraine.
The intention was to piggyback on the visibility and wide reach of the replies section of accounts with large followings to seed messages with both influencers and their audiences, according to social-media researchers. The fake accounts, often posing as Americans, targeted a range of prominent political and media influencers, including U.S. lawmakers, journalists and news organizations, by replying to their posts, according to a Wall Street Journal review of more than a thousand posts.
In July, the U.S. Justice Department disclosed a list of usernames for nearly 1,000 X accounts tied to a bot farm that the department said was operated by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. But the DOJ shared few
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