Giving Compass' Take:

· According to Jackie Marchildon at Global Citizen, Russian trolls and bots interfered with Americans' online vaccine debates on Twitter, attacking both pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine supporters. 

· How has technology changed the way individual discuss important issues? Why is this important? 

· Read more about vaccines and how immunization is vital to win the war against disease.  

Russian trolls didn’t just meddle in the 2016 US presidential election. It turns out they also sought to interfere with how Americans debated vaccines on Twitter — but from both sides of the argument.

A new study, “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate,” was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. Its objective was to “understand how Twitter bots and trolls ... promote online health content.”

The research found that Russian trolls and bots took to Twitter to attack pro-vaccine and anti-vaccines movements in the United States.

The strange online campaign seems to have had the goal of simply increasing hostility and divisions online, according to the New York Times.

“You see this pattern,” David A. Broniatowski, a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, told the New York Times. “On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They’re about sowing discord.”

Read the full article about vaccine debates by Jackie Marchildon at Global Citizen.