Top Highlights

• mid 2015—having mastered the art of social-media meddling—the trolls tested out a new tactic organizing a live event in the United States, according to an investigation by the Russian business magazine RBC. Using Facebook accounts based in Saint Petersburg, they posed as Americans and lured users to a free hot-dog event in New York. Of course, the ...
• It was the moment when they realized that no algorithm could do the job. When I said that to a senior official at the company, he grimaced and asked, “You think there will be more?”
• “The key was getting them at the right moment,” Yasmin Green, who helped spearhead the movement, told me. It turned out there was a small window of time between when potential recruits develop an interest in joining an extremist group and when they make the decision. Rapid exposure to the personal testimony of former recruits who escaped from the b...
• was part of an evolving effort to find ways to disable key industries,” said Brian Lord, a former deputy director for intelligence and cyber operations at Britain’s GCHQ. “All I have to do
• is create a moderately disabling attack on a key part of the social infrastructure, and then watch the media sensationalize it and panic the public.”