Report suggests Russian trolls used Mollie Tibbetts' murder to distract from Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort's trial
Moments after a pair of damaging stories about President Donald Trump and his former associates broke this week, Russian bots unleashed divisive content about the Mollie Tibbetts murder, reportedly to distract the public’s attention from the ongoing political scandal.
A detailed report by the Independent shows the co-relation between the spike in the activity of pro-Kremlin online bots and the announcement of the guilty verdict in the trial of Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman who was convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud charges.
According to the report, on Tuesday afternoon, a network of Russia-linked Twitter accounts began bombarding Twitter with news about the murder of the 20-year-old Tibbetts murder, with special emphasis on the fact that the convicted murderer was an “illegal immigrant”.