Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017

Abstract

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study—especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election—as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.

Engaging with Others: How the IRA Coordinated Information Operation Made Friends

“…Networked output may serve several functions beyond the obvious repetition of a given message including (1) forming a connection with an individual user, (2) efficiently communicating a greater volume of messaging, (3) amplifying the original poster, and (4) signaling acceptance or rejection of the original poster. Work to date has analyzed the content produced by the IRA accounts, but has mostly been interested in accounts external to the troll network either as a way of inferring the operation's strategy and who might be affected by it (Bail et al, 2020;Stewart, et al, 2018;Freelon & Lokot, 2020) or in measuring the extent that outsiders shared IRA content (Badaway, et al, 2018). Far from being passive users useful only as an audience for troll content, or as vectors for sharing it with others, external accounts were, in fact, an additional tool to be employed.…”

Influencing overseas Chinese by tweets: text-images as the key tactic of Chinese propaganda

“…Although being a novice of Twitter, the Chinese government has been evolving on its deployment of propaganda tactics through coordinated disinformation and bot accounts [ 7 , 14 , 20 ]. Whereas Russia’s operations attempt at sowing discord and widening political division in the western countries [ 1 , 2 , 10 ], China’s foreign propaganda ( daweixuan ) tend to focus on creating “polyphonic Twitter content” that projects the “Chinese dream” [ 13 ] to the world as well as to its diaspora. The #USAVirus tweets echo such a practice.…”

What is at stake in the information sphere? Anxieties about malign information influence among ordinary Swedes

“…Knowledge on the effects of malign information influence is scant, whereas available data is inconclusive (e.g. Hayes and Guardino 2011;Della Vigna et al 2014;Tucker et al 2018;Bail et al 2019;Lanoszka 2019). We thus need better knowledge about the seriousness of the perceived danger and also about what kinds of damage it can do.…”