Russian trolls may have spun Skripal poll

RUSSIAN Twitter trolls have been attempting to show that Britons do not believe Vladimir Putin is behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, it has been claimed.

The potentially fake accounts, which experts say could be linked to a “bot factory” in St Petersberg, had retweeted a poll by a British user on the issue that tallied more than 15,700 votes.

Less that two weeks after the former double agent and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned using a nerve agent in Salisbury city centre, Rachael Swindon, a Twitter user, asked if people thought Theresa May “has supplied enough evidence for us to be able to confidently point the finger of blame towards Russia?”.

Some 77 per cent voted “no”, leading the blogger, who is a vocal supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and has more than 57,000 followers, to conclude that “the mood of the British public is starting to shift”.

However, an analysis by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, showed that some of the most influential retweets of the vote originated from pro-kremlin accounts that seemed to be organised. The accusation comes amid outrage over the Russian government’s use of troll or bot factories – organised groups of anonymous political commentators who deploy trolling and disinformation to promote pro-putin and prorussian propaganda.

Ben Nimmo, a senior research fellow at the lab, concluded that the retweets appeared to be an “attempt by pro-russian users to influence the online poll, and thus create the appearance of greater hostility towards the UK Government than UK users themselves showed”.

Researchers also suspect that one of the most retweeted accounts mentioning the poisoning of Col Skripal could be linked to the troll factory that “shows the power which anonymous trolls with demonstrably falsified profiles continue to wield online”.

Twitter, which did not respond to a request for comment, has faced increasing pressure to deal with trolls and bots and says that it suspends accounts that are found not to be genuine.

Russian trolls have previously been accused of meddling in both the US election and the Brexit campaign.