Twitter backtracks on Russian troll bot claims, media ignores updated info

"Twitter quietly revised its public database of ‘Russian bot’ accounts earlier this month, removing 228 accounts it previously said were “connected to Russia”— but the admission has gone almost completely unnoticed by the media.

Bloomberg reported on the “burst of activity” from the bot accounts and claimed that Russia's “social-media trolling operation” was “stepping up its Twitter presence to new heights.”

Fast-forward to 2019 and Twitter has removed 228 of these accounts from the database, saying they had “initially misidentified” them as being linked to Russia, but nobody in the media seems to have noticed.

In fact, Bloomberg is the only major US outlet which bothered to correct the story to reflect reality, admitting that Twitter’s changes to the dataset “invalidate central portions” of its original report and that there was “no surge” in this so-called Russian bot activity at the time in question. Oops!

Pivot to Venezuela!
Interestingly, the highlighted accounts have now been linked to Venezuela, another country the US government just so happens to have bad blood with.

In a tweet, Twitter’s “head of site integrity” Yoel Roth said that the company can now “more confidently associate” the 228 accounts with Venezuela. Roth’s short tweet thread on the misidentification was met with little interest receiving only a few retweets and no attention from media figures who supposedly actively follow any and all news remotely related to Russian activity online."

Source - [link to www.rt.com (secure)]