Russian Troll Tweets Duped Global Media Thousands of Times

By Ben Popkin @ NBCNews.com, Nov. 3

[....] On Wednesday, the House Intelligence Committee publicly released for the first time the list of over 2,700 handles provided by Twitter that the social media platform linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian intelligence agency-linked firm based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Exclusive to NBC News, the list of known IRA-linked handles published by the committee was cross-referenced against an archive of tweets by 855 politicians and public figures tracked by PolitiTweet, an online tool published by PolitiWatch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology and public accountability organization.

And reporters and editors for over 20,000 global news outlets embedded the Russian propaganda tweets from Jan. 1, 2016, to Sept. 30, 2017, according to social media analysis by Meltwater, a San Francisco-based media intelligence company, which shared its findings with NBC News.

The result was a list of high-influence individuals and accounts that inadvertently promoted Russian state-sponsored propaganda, previously unreported in its entirety. The handles flagged in the database, along with less than half-a-dozen from previous reports, include [....]