After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced<br />“What we’re seeing is a continuous assault by Russia to target and undermine our democratic institutions, and they’re going to keep coming at us.”<br />When the Russian bots jumped on the hashtag #Parklandshooting — initially created to spread news of the shooting — they quickly stoked tensions.<br />The bots are “going to find any contentious issue,<br />and instead of making it an opportunity for compromise and negotiation, they turn it into an unsolvable issue bubbling with frustration,” said Karen North, a social media professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.<br />“We’ve had more than a year to get our act together and address the threat posed by Russia and implement a strategy to deter future attacks,<br />but I believe, unfortunately, we still don’t have a comprehensive plan,” said Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during a hearing this month on global threats to the United States.<br />Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been<br />focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
