Putin's internet trolls have a new way to disrupt the 2020 election: report

According to a report at Bloomberg, Russian internet trolls are changing strategy on how they plan to interfere in the 2020 election that likely will see President Donald Trump running for re-election.

The report states that in 2016, Russians working to influence the election did it by creating propaganda themselves which filtered through social media sites like Facebook, creating discord as users forwarded the false stories that then bubbled up and eclipsed real news.

According to Bloomberg, those same hackers plan to promote "politically divisive messages through phony social media accounts."

"The Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency may be among those trying to circumvent protections put in place by companies including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to find and remove fake content that hackers created to sow division among the American electorate in the 2016 presidential campaign," Bloomberg reports.

“Instead of creating content themselves, we see them amplifying content,” explained the director of intelligence analysis John Hultquist of FireEye Inc. “Then it’s not necessarily inauthentic, and that creates an opportunity for them to hide behind somebody else.”

The report notes that pushing divisive stories is nothing new, but Russian hackers and trolls see it as an effective way to influence the upcoming 2020 election.

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