The meme-laden Tumblr platform has become the latest social media and blogging outlet to be unearthed as a distribution channel for Russian agents seeking to influence citizens’ voting habits, according to a report by BuzzFeed News. Facebook and Twitter have faced scrutiny since the 2016 US presidential election, but other platforms in spreading Kremlin propaganda have faced less examination.
BuzzFeed worked with researcher Jonathan Albright from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University to identify Russian-backed account activity on Tumblr. The analysis reveals a highly engaged and far-reaching network of Russian trolls focused primarily on black issues and activism, which has apparently been part of an ongoing campaign since early 2015.
Tumblr owner Oath’s press office was unable to provide comment regarding the research due to its parent company TechCrunch. The methodology used for unmasking Russian agents on Tumblr appears relatively simple - cross-referencing Tumblr accounts that use similar or identical user names from a previously submitted list of known Internet Research Agency (IRA) accounts.
In addition, Twitter updated its list of Russian bot accounts in January to reveal an additional 13k IRA-linked bots making election-related tweets. This brings the total number of identified Russian-linked bots on Twitter alone to over 50,000. It is currently unclear how impactful these Kremlin agents’ Tumblr disinformation campaigns were during the US presidential election.
The research also found that Russian-linked Tumblr accounts cross-posted content from other social platforms including Twitter and Instagram. BuzzFeed reports that most of the IRA-linked Tumblrs identified are no longer active on the platform, although two still share content - although it is noted that their content is completely unrelated to each other.
The research uncovered a network of links out from Tumblr to
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