“Donald Trump Is My President!”: The Internet Research Agency Propaganda Machine

Abstract

This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th-century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 user profiles and 6,377 tweets posted by the agency between 2012 and 2017. We manually coded the source as identifiable, obfuscated, or impersonated and classified the campaign target of IRA operations using an inductive typology based on profile descriptions, images, location, language, and tweeted content. The qualitative variables were analyzed as relative frequencies to test the extent to which the IRA’s black, gray, and white propaganda are deployed with clearly defined targets for short-, medium-, and long-term propaganda strategies. The results show that source classification from propaganda theory remains a valid framework to understand IRA’s propaganda machine and that the agency operates a composite of different user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, including openly pro-Russian profiles, local American and German news sources, pro-Trump conservatives, and Black Lives Matter activists.

Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

“…However, they also argue that the fake accounts were slightly more prevalent in the left-leaning cluster of retweets (Steward et al 2018). Similarly, Bastos and Farkas (2019) find a group of IRA accounts that engaged with the Black Lives Matter topic on Twitter. They argue that the goal of these messages may have been to discourage African-Americans from voting for Clinton, or from voting altogether.…”

How Politics Shape Views Toward Fact-Checking: Evidence from Six European Countries

“…Online disinformation is a growing concern among the public and policy makers, with high-profile cases including Russia’s Internet Research Agency “troll factory” (Bastos and Farkas 2019) and Macedonian teenagers producing pro-Trump “fake news” (Silverman and Alexander 2016). Although the overall reach of these campaigns may be limited (Fletcher et al.…”

This Account Doesn’t Exist: Tweet Decay and the Politics of Deletion in the Brexit Debate

“…Group 4 identified 15% as the deletion baseline for hashtagged tweets in 2016 (Q1=.10, x̄=.15, ̃=.15, Q3=.19), with this baseline sharply increasing as the topic of the conversation became more contentious. Protest activism hashtags presented a tweet decay of nearly 30% for 15maydebout and 44% for blacklivesmatter, a hashtag campaign notable for being targeted by the Russian IRA operations (Bastos & Farkas, 2019). Brexit related discussions also verge around 30% (Q1=.24, x̄=.28, ̃=.29, Q3=.32), a figure that is not too different from what was observed in openly partisan hashtags associated with the Remain campaign (Q1=.23, x̄=.30, ̃=.26, Q3=.32).…”