Left Trolls accounted for 14 percent of the data with 230 handles and 405,549

tweets. These accounts were more apt to use hashtags such as #MuslimBan or
#BlackLivesMatter, tweeting about topics such as gender, religious, and sexual
identity in a manner that researchers surmise was meant to divide the
Democratic party.

The other three categories had decidedly different aims. News Feed trolls were
the third largest category at 20.2 percent (54 handles and 567,846 tweets);
according to the researchers, their aim was to serve as local news aggregators
with handles such as @OnlineMemphis and @TodayPittsburgh, linking to
legitimate news sources but sometimes tweeting with a pro-Russia slant.

Hashtag Gamer trolls had nothing to do with video games. Coming in at a

smaller percentage of tweets at 8.1 percent (110 handles and 216,895 tweets),
the category refers to the hashtag games played often on Twitter. For example,
the researchers said accounts often played innocuous games like
#ThingsILearnedFromCartoons, interspersed with more political hashtags such
as #OffendEveryoneIn4Words and #ItsSoWhiteOutside.

Linvill and Warren didn’t focus as heavily on the commercial category (business
marketing tweets), and another small percentage of the data went
uncategorized. Finally, there’s the Fearmongering category at a minuscule 0.4
percent (122 handles and 10,161 tweets), which spread news of fake crises, like
claiming salmonella-contaminated turkeys produced by Koch Foods were being
sold at Walmart during the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday.

Russian election meddling is showing no signs of slowing down. Microsoft has

already stymied several hacking attempts on 2018 midterm election candidates,
and Trump administration officials have issued a stern warning about Russia’s
plan for the 2018 midterm elections.

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