Move over, Facebook and Twitter. Russian trolls are expanding their social media portfolio and going longform with a growing footprint on Medium. Over the past few years, Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns have increasingly turned to the sleek, minimalist writing platform to host fake articles—stories that fed into Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine conspiracy theories and other favorite topics of Moscow. So how are trolls abusing the tech industry’s favorite self-publisher and what is the company doing about it?
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Most social platforms have gone through a Kübler-Ross-style grief cycle when confronted with the problem of disinformation and what they intend to do about it. Sites like Facebook started out with denial—Mark Zuckerberg famously brushed off President Obama’s November 2016 warning about foreign disinformation on the platform—and have since moved to somewhere between bargaining and acceptance.