Russian trolls active on Twitter in Belgium and the Netherlands since the attacks

" Russian trolls " tried to influence public debate in the Netherlands and Belgium, reports the Dutch newspaper NRC. Accounts emanating from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), considered a " trolls factory " linked to the Kremlin, have broadcast at least 900 messages in Dutch in the last two years. the survey conducted by the daily on the basis of the 200,000 tweets from the IRA

Although Twitter deleted the accounts and their tweets, NRC was able to compare two archives and reconstruct part 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 started to be active in Dutch.

Small sentences in Dutch were then copied to Twitter, with spelling errors, 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 "19459004" cultural war in the Netherlands, retweeting innumerable messages about a culture supposedly threatened by "" Islamization ", badyzes the daily.

These messages also offered their support to PVV and Dutch right-wing MP Geert Wilders, who is leading the training. His party won second place in the legislative elections of 2017, and is the first opposition party in the Netherlands