Originally posted by the Voice of America.
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Russian Influence Peddlers Carving Out New Audiences on Fringes

Jeff Seldin

   WASHINGTON - After four years of warnings and preparations, the 2020
   presidential election did not see a repeat of 2016, when intelligence
   officials concluded Russia meddled using a combination of cyberattacks
   and influence operations.
   But according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, as
   well as analysts, the good news ends there.
   The Russians, they warn, have been busy laying the foundation for
   future success.
   Instead of relying on troll farms and fake social media accounts to try
   to sway the thoughts and opinions of American voters, they warn the
   Kremlin's influence peddlers have instead gained a new foothold,
   establishing themselves as part of the United States's news and social
   media ecosystem, ingratiating themselves to U.S. audiences on the far
   right and the far left.
   "A lot of these campaigns are getting engagement in the millions,"
   Evanna Hu, chief executive officer of Omelas, told VOA. "They are
   pretty good at inducing the type of sentiment, a negative sentiment or
   a positive sentiment in the audience, from their posts."
   Omelas, a Washington-based firm that tracks online extremism for
   defense contractors, has been studying Russian content across 11 social
   media platforms and hundreds of RSS feeds in multiple languages,
   collecting 1.2 million posts in a 90-day period surrounding the
   November 3 election.
   It found the most prolific Russian outlets included state-backed media
   outlets like RT, Sputnik, TASS and Izvestia TV.

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