From NBC News:

Russia-linked Twitter accounts promoted ‘doxxing’ over racial tension videos

Clemson University researchers found videos of confrontations between white people and minorities received instrumental early social media promotion from inauthentic accounts.New research shows how effective Russian disinformation can be in influencing public opinion

AUG. 8, 201901:38

By Ben Popken, Richard Engel, Kate Benyon-Tinker and Monika Ghosh

In October 2018, a cellphone video of a Brooklyn woman calling 911 to claim a 9-year-old black boy grabbed her rear went viral on social media, becoming one of a series of videos that activists and journalists seized upon as an example of the everyday racism faced by minorities in America.

That woman became known as “Cornerstore Caroline.” Other individuals who became the subjects of similar stories would be known by nicknames such as “Basketball Becky” or “Taco Truck Tammy.”

Now, Clemson University researchers have found those videos received instrumental early social media promotion from inauthentic accounts, some of which have since been removed by Twitter and linked by U.S. intelligence to Russia’s efforts to stoke racial tensions in America.

The tweets by the suspicious accounts drew 50-90 percent of the initial retweets before the stories took off, an indication their content played a leading role in drumming up attention, according to the researchers’ pre-publication findings.

Darren Linvill, an associate professor of communications, and Patrick Warren, an associate professor of economics, both at Clemson, identified more than 300 tweets from almost 30 suspicious Twitter accounts that appeared to look for and promote videos of racially tense incidents.

“Fundamentally, what they’re trying to do is put a spotlight and rub salt in the wound of these divisive issues,” Linvill told NBC News, referring to the strategy of using social media to exacerbate racial tensions.