In the last 48 hours, Congress has contended with how to end a government shutdown that began over the weekend, and Russian Twitter bots have made every effort to blame that shutdown on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to tracking data on Hamilton 68, a site established by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (and housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States) to track the activity of Russian Twitter bots, #schumershutdown was used by accounts linked to Russian influence operations 576 times in the last 48 hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other top hashtags include #releasethememo, in reference to a four-page document compiled by a group of House Republicans on the Department of Justice special counsel Robert Muller\u2019s investigation, and #maga \u2014 Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d campaign slogan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter recently conducted a retroactive investigation into Russian interference and activity on their platform related to the 2016 presidential election. As a result of this investigation, the company emailed nearly 700,000 users in the U.S. to let them know that they had followed, retweeted or liked a tweet from one or more Russia-linked accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In total, Twitter identified 50,258 automated accounts that were Russian-linked and tweeting election-related content during the 2016 election, which the company characterized as a \u201cchallenge to democratic societies everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russian Twitter bots spent the weekend trying to blame Democrats for the government shutdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":54205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":38,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[38,106,31,33,9],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2853],"class_list":["post-18507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters","category-federal-oversight"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"FWN7IOGDWBGF7FZWG5NEUUODTA","arc_canonical_url":"\/federal-oversight\/congress\/2018\/01\/22\/schumershutdown-trending-with-russia-linked-twitter-bots\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n