Did Russia Meddle in Brexit? A Social Media Study Casts Doubt<br />Twitter, in a separate response to the same committee, said it had examined accounts "previously identified as likely funded from Russian sources." The company said it found only one of those accounts<br />that promoted content about Brexit in the two months before the referendum: the Twitter account of Russia’s English-language news network, Russia Today.<br />Academics, lawmakers and journalists have raised the possibility<br />that Russian entities might have used social media around the time of the referendum — known as Brexit — just as the Kremlin was aggressively exploiting Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to try to influence the American presidential election.<br />Supported by By David D. Kirkpatrick LONDON — An academic study set to be released on Tuesday casts doubt on speculation<br />that Russia might have exploited social media to try to influence Britain’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.<br />Last week, Facebook said in response to a parliamentary committee examining the question<br />that the company had also found no evidence of significant Russian advertising on its platform around Brexit, although the details of the company’s internal inquiry were not disclosed.<br />Examining two weeks of tweets in June 2016, shortly before the June 23 referendum, the study found<br />that only 84 of the identified Russian accounts posted about the referendum, and they generated only 6,734 tweets or retweets.
