“Don’t get #vaccines. It’s medicine!”With messages like those, Russian internet trolls meddling in the 2016 presidential election also lashed out at Americans debating the safety of vaccines, a new study has found. But instead of picking a side, researchers said, the trolls and bots they programmed hurled insults at both pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. “You see this pattern,” said David A. Broniatowski , a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. They’re about sowing discord.”

Source: New York Times August 23, 2018 20:37 UTC