Russian bots dropped 45,000 garbage tweets on us during the Brexit referendum

Reports of Russian trolls meddling into the U.S. elections are quite widespread, and even subject to a recent congressional investigation.

Less well-known is Russia's interference in the UK's referendum on European Union membership in 2016.

But now a paper -- still incomplete -- by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, is digging into the magnitude of Russian Brexit-related tweets -- and the provisional results are astonishing.

Russian accounts that normally tweet in Russian and whose main subject was the Ukrainian conflict swiftly switched to English ahead of the June 2016 referendum and dumped a staggering 45,000 tweets in 48 hours with the hashtag “#Brexit,” paper co-author Tho Pham told Mashable.

The study observed a total of 156,252 Russian accounts for one month before and one month after the 23 June referendum.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The pro-Putin accounts posted around 39,000 tweets on 24 June, the day the results of the referendum were announced, before dropping off almost completely.

"For the referendum, the massive number of Russian-related tweets were only created few days before the voting day, reached its peak during the voting and result days then dropped immediately afterwards," said the paper.

As with the U.S. elections, many of these Russian accounts were bots or semi-automated accounts that spread mostly Leave propaganda in an attempt to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

Researchers "observe that the influence of pro-leave bots is stronger the influence of pro-remain bots."

"Similarly, pro-Trump bots are more influential than pro-Clinton bots. Thus, to some degree, the use of social bots might drive the outcomes of Brexit and the U.S. election," they said.

There are a number of pro-Remain accounts, though, hinting that "the Russian goal may have been simply to sow division," according to The Times, which first reported on the paper.

The Times also mentioned two Russian accounts: @Stormbringer15 and @Sveta1972, which tweeted pro-Russian, pro-Brexit propaganda before and immediately after the referendum.

One of these tweets called for Britain to “make June the 23rd our Independence Day.”

These reports come after UK Prime Minister Theresa May accused Russia of "trying to sow discord in the West."