Russians use of Social Media

Have you ever wondered how Russia is always involved in some type of “Hacking”? Recent studies have shown that, most of these hackers use several social media platforms for these tasks. Sara Fischer, wrote an article on “How the Russians operated under our radar”. As citizens of our country we have heard a lot about Russia meddling with our last election, which resulted in Donald Trump becoming our President. How well do we know if this was true?

According to the Sara, it would take a lot of reporting and investigation to get to learn more about how Russian disinformation caused them to meddle with the United States election. It caused a good amount of division but now there is a good chance to understanding how they were able to get this done. Spammers used traffic through ads to sell to some news outlets. They were able to automated platforms and advertising to target micro political groups.

One of the most talked about things they did was to use fake social media accounts and pages to trick people to believe what they were doing. They knew they could gain more information using these fake profiles to reach the masses. Other sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google just to mention a few had also sold ads to some of these Russians and they used that as well as a target for these activities.

With all these accesses the Russians have, it can affect the future of communications, the reason being. Social media came about as a way of people being able to communicate and interact. Facebook for example started as a social networking site that helped people to connect with old family and friends and it has stayed to that, but having these recent fake accounts that are being used to lure people for their money and even to the point that others lose their lives. At this point I think the government should be able to regulate each social media platform. This way it could help in monitoring how things work on there. The government would also be able to track down any illegal activities that goes on there, including other foreign countries trying to have access to confidential documents. We have all heard how the Russians were able to leak Hillary Clinton’s emails last year before the elections. If the government has strict regulations it would not only protect the people, but it would protect the government as well.

 

• Below are some charts that shows how Russians use of social media has been detailed on different social media platforms.