04:41 – Russian trolls active on Twitter in Belgium and the Netherlands since the attacks

Russian "trolls" have tried to influence public debate in the Netherlands and Belgium, reports the Dutch newspaper NRC. Accounts from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), considered as a Kremlin-related "troll factory", broadcast at least 900 messages in Dutch in the last two years, according to the survey conducted by the 200 Twitter tweets from the IRA. Although Twitter removed the accounts and their tweets, NRC was able to compare two archives and reconstruct some of the activity of these Russian trolls. These began with the attacks of 22 March 2016 in Zaventem and Brussels, which according to NRC correspond to the first moment when the trolls began to be active in Dutch. Small sentences in Dutch were then copied to Twitter, with spelling mistakes, and almost always related to hashtags (key words preceded by the pound sign) critical of Islam, like #IslamKills. The Russian trolls then mixed in the months following the attacks on a "cultural war" in the Netherlands by retweeting innumerable messages about a culture supposedly threatened by "Islamization", the daily badyzes. These messages also offered support to PVV and Dutch right-wing MP Geert Wilders, who is leading the training. His party won second place in the 2017 parliamentary elections, and is the first opposition party in the Netherlands. (Belga)

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