“Don’t get #vaccines. Illuminati are behind it.”

“Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don’t you #vaccinate them? 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. Their only intent, the study concluded, seemed to be to raise the level of hostility.

“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. “On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They’re about sowing discord.”