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From its "troll factory" in St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which manages 3,841 troll accounts, has tried to spark an anti-Islam sentiment and ignite the debate over refugees in Belgium
The Dutch newspaper NRC has gotten hold of concrete and astonishing evidence. He found more than 900 statements in Dutch published by Russian trolls on Twitter. As the platform has recently removed all accounts related to the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, the newspaper does not exclude that many other tweets in Dutch may have been sent previously. It is also possible that other undiscovered accounts are still active.
The newspaper found tweets in Dutch in two archives containing more than 200,000 deleted messages. These had been sent from accounts connected to the IRA, the trolls factory of the Russian government. One of these archives can be viewed on the website of the American news channel NBC News, the other archives were sent to the newspaper via an anonymous source.
Attacks and Debate on Refugees
NRC leaned tweets sent on the day of the attacks in Brussels, March 22, 2016. According to the newspaper, they shared the same spelling mistakes and were equipped with anti-Islam hashtags such as #StopIslam and #IslamKills (Islam kills).
According to NRC, the trolls tweeted in Dutch after the attacks in Brussels. In addition to critical messages about Islam, they also reportedly sent messages to the refugee debate.
Best results in English
According to the newspaper, messages in Dutch were not particularly retweeted . Troll messages published in English would have been much more successful. Especially in the Netherlands and Belgium. According to NRC, more than 6,000 Twitter users in the Dutch language shared about 30,000 tweets in English to some 9.5 million subscribers.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is an institute linked to the Russian government. With trolls hired for a specific purpose, Russia would have tried, inter alia, to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections. Some say they are responsible for the victory of Donald Trump.
