Russian Internet Research Agency Research Articles

Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior

There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.

Engagement with partisan Russian troll tweets during the 2016 U.S. presidential election: a social identity perspective

AbstractOperatives working for the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) infiltrated social media with the goal of disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We investigate how these operatives or “trolls” leveraged partisan political identities in discussing presidential candidates and parties on Twitter. Adopting a social identity lens, we conceptualize retweeting troll content as a form of identity performance and examine the message properties that led troll tweets to resonate among Twitter users. The findings highlight the importance of partisan trolls’ persistence in tweeting about candidates and parties as well as their discussion of the political outgroup and incivility in the form of name-calling. The results collectively indicate that Twitter users were sensitive to messages generated by IRA trolls and responded in a manner consistent with identity performance.

Image Clustering: An Unsupervised Approach to Categorize Visual Data in Social Science Research

Automated image analysis has received increasing attention in social scientific research, yet existing scholarship has mostly covered the application of supervised learning to classify images into predefined categories. This study focuses on the task of unsupervised image clustering, which aims to automatically discover categories from unlabelled image data. We first review the steps to perform image clustering and then focus on one key challenge in this task—finding intermediate representations of images. We present several methods of extracting intermediate image representations, including the bag-of-visual-words model, self-supervised learning, and transfer learning (in particular, feature extraction with pretrained models). We compare these methods using various visual datasets, including images related to protests in China from Weibo, images about climate change on Instagram, and profile images of the Russian Internet Research Agency on Twitter. In addition, we propose a systematic way to interpret and validate clustering solutions. Results show that transfer learning significantly outperforms the other methods. The dataset used in the pretrained model critically determines what categories the algorithms can discover.

Russian Troll Vaccine Misinformation Dissemination on Twitter: The Role of Political Partisanship

ABSTRACT Although vaccine misinformation has been a longstanding problem, the growth of social media and divides based on political ideology have raised novel concerns. One noteworthy example involves the Russian Internet Research Agency’s deployment of operatives on Twitter (i.e., trolls) working to sow discord among the American public. We examine 1,959 tweets made by trolls between 2015 and 2017 about vaccination to better understand their efforts to spread vaccine misinformation. Our results indicate that misinformation was more likely to be perpetuated by left and right trolls than nonpartisan trolls. There was, however, relatively little user engagement with vaccine tweets containing misinformation and no differences in engagement with misinformation shared by partisan and nonpartisan trolls. Trends in the psycholinguistic properties of language in trolls’ vaccine tweets suggest that right and left trolls were more likely to include cognitive process words (i.e., insight, causation, discrepancy, certainty, differentiation, and tentativeness) than were nonpartisan trolls.

Assessing the Russian Troll Efforts to Sow Discord on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Election

Abstract Although experts agree that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed trolls on Twitter to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election, questions remain about the nuances of their efforts. We examined almost 350,000 original tweets made during the two-year electoral cycle to investigate the emphasis, timing, content, and partisanship of the trolls’ efforts targeting leading candidates. Despite only dedicating a fraction of their tweets to candidates, troll behavior generally tracked the relevance of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz during the election cycle. Trolls were significantly more likely to engage in name-calling in tweets about Trump, Clinton, and Cruz than in tweets about other topics. Name-calling peaked in tweets addressing Clinton during the general election. Right trolls were more likely to focus their attention on Trump, Clinton, and Cruz than were other partisan trolls.

Inauthentic Newsfeeds and Agenda Setting in a Coordinated Inauthentic Information Operation

The 2015–2017 Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)’s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic “newsfeeds” made up a large, underanalyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1,000 tweets from the IRA newsfeeds and a matched set of real news sources from those same cities with up to five labels indicating the tweet represents a world in unrest and, if so, of what sort. We train a natural language classifier to extend these labels to 268 k IRA tweets and 1.13 million control tweets. Compared to the controls, tweets from the IRA were 34% more likely to represent unrest, especially crime and identity danger, and this difference jumped to about twice as likely in the months immediately before the election. Agenda setting by media is well-known and well-studied, but this weaponization by a coordinated information operation is novel.

Reverse-engineering political protest: the Russian Internet Research Agency in the Heart of Texas

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the public slowly began to grapple with the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), elements of which were carried out on Facebook. Campaigns targeted people in the United States in many ways, including by publishing event pages on Facebook that were at times piggybacking on existing events, stoking fear, anger and other emotions already on the rise in an increasingly tribal political climate. In the summer before the election, two particular Facebook pages – ‘Heart of Texas’ and the ‘United Muslims of America,’ published events advertising protests in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center, a mosque and religious center in downtown Houston. Our study reverse-engineers the IRA-inspired ‘Heart of Texas’ protests on 21 May 2016, using qualitative in-depth interviews with 14 individuals connected to these events – including counterprotest participants and local organizers, journalists who covered the protest, as well as representatives of local organizations. Results shed light on the role that news media played in protest coverage, the dynamics at the protest, issues around vetting information and the serendipity around how protests emerge and get organized on and off social media. This research documents and critically assesses the on-the-ground transactions such propaganda foments and offers insights into the role of social media in local protests.

Assembling the Networks and Audiences of Disinformation: How Successful Russian IRA Twitter Accounts Built Their Followings, 2015–2017

AbstractThis study investigates how successful Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts constructed the followings that were central to their disinformation campaigns around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Treating an account’s social media following as both an ego network and an audience critical for information diffusion and influence accrual, we situate IRA Twitter accounts’ accumulation of followers in the ideologically polarized, attention driven, and asymmetric political communication system. Results show that partisan enclaves on Twitter contributed to IRA accounts’ followings through retweeting; and that mainstream and hyperpartisan media assisted conservative IRA accounts’ following gain by embedding their tweets in news. These results illustrate how network dynamics within social media and news media amplification beyond it together boosted social media followings. Our results also highlight the dynamics fanning the flames of disinformation: partisan polarization, media fragmentation and asymmetry, and an attention economy optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.

Manufacturing rage: The Russian Internet Research Agency’s political astroturfing on social media

This paper examines social media ads purchased by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). Using a public dataset, we employ a mixed method to analyze the thematic and strategic patterns of these ads. Due to Facebook and Instagram’s promotional features, IRA managed to microtarget audiences mostly located in the United States fitting its messages to suit the audiences’ political, racial, gendered, and in some cases religious backgrounds. The findings reveal the divisive nature and topics that are dominant in the dataset including: race, immigration, and police brutality. By expanding on the theoretical conceptualization of astroturfing strategy that focuses on carefully concealing the identity and intention of actors behind social media activities, we argue that IRA has added political astroturfing as a powerful tool at a low cost contributing to the broader Russian geopolitical disinformation campaign strategies. The IRA made use of the business model of Facebook and Instagram in an attempt to further divide its targeted audiences and by highlighting mostly negative issues with a potential goal of fuelling political rage.

Characterizing the Use of Images in State-Sponsored Information Warfare Operations by Russian Trolls on Twitter

State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control, aka trolls, that post and interact with other users disguised as “regular” users. These accounts often use images and memes, along with textual content, in order to increase the engagement and the credibility of their posts.In this paper, we present the first study of images shared by state-sponsored accounts by analyzing a ground truth dataset of 1.8M images posted to Twitter by accounts controlled by the Russian Internet Research Agency. First, we analyze the content of the images as well as their posting activity. Then, using Hawkes Processes, we quantify their influence on popular Web communities like Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, with respect to the dissemination of images. We find that the extensive image posting activity of Russian trolls coincides with real-world events (e.g., the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), and shed light on their targets as well as the content disseminated via images. Finally, we show that the trolls were more effective in disseminating politics-related imagery than other images.

Rhetorical Exhaustion & the Ethics of Amplification

Abstract Though digital amplification is often understood to afford energy and reach, this article examines ways digital rhetors also use amplification to exhaust audiences. This article forwards rhetorical exhaustion as both effect and strategy, a frame for understanding how digital rhetors wear down rhetorical opponents. First, this article recovers the classical rhetorical figures of amplification and accumulation, highlighting their reliance on accumulation as a strategy and an ethics of concern for audiences’ energies. Next, this article analyzes the 2016 election interference strategies of the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). Analysis of two US Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned reports shows how the IRA worked to energize audiences through outrage, then sought to exhaust Black audiences’ energies for civic engagement. The IRA practiced slow circulation through rhetorical persistence to create a civic affect of cynicism aimed at demotivating audiences. Rhetorical exhaustion highlights the productive potential of exhaustion—as rhetorical effect, as strategic uses of digital amplification, and as an ethical concern for digital rhetors. As such, rhetorical exhaustion offers a useful counter to paradigms of viral circulation and fake news in 21st century digital circulation.

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

We analyzed the Russian Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) 2015–2017 English-language information operation on Twitter to understand the special role that engagement with outsiders (i.e., non-IRA affiliated accounts) played in their campaign. By analyzing the timing and type of engagement of IRA accounts with non-IRA affiliated accounts, and the characteristics of the latter, we identified a

Russian Twitter Accounts and the Partisan Polarization of Vaccine Discourse, 2015-2017.

Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas.Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify "thematic personas" (i.e., accounts that consistently share the same topics), we analyzed the ways in which each discussed vaccines.Results. We found differences in volume and valence of vaccine-related tweets among 9 thematic personas. Pro-Trump personas were more likely to express antivaccine sentiment. Anti-Trump personas expressed support for vaccination. Others offered a balanced valence, talked about vaccines neutrally, or did not tweet about vaccines.Conclusions. IRA-operated accounts discussed vaccines in manners consistent with fabricated US identities.Public Health Implications. IRA accounts discussed vaccines online in ways that evoked political identities. This could exacerbate recently emerging partisan gaps relating to vaccine misinformation, as differently valenced messages were targeted at different segments of the US public. These sophisticated targeting efforts, if repeated and increased in reach, could reduce vaccination rates and magnify health disparities.

GOVERNANCE OF THE FACEBOOK PRIVACY CRISIS

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page story describing how Facebook concealed knowledge and disclosure of Russian-linked activity and exploitation resulting in Kremlin led disruption of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, through the use of global hate campaigns and propaganda warfare. By mid-December 2018, it became clear that the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections were much more extensive than previously thought. Two studies conducted for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), by: (1) Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika; and (2) New Knowledge, provide considerable new information and analysis about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) influence operations targeting American citizens.By early 2019 it became apparent that a number of influential and successful high growth social media platforms had been used by nation states for propaganda purposes. Over two years earlier, Russia was called out by the U.S. intelligence community for their meddling with the 2016 American presidential elections. The extent to which prominent social media platforms have been used, either willingly or without their knowledge, by foreign powers continues to be investigated as this Article goes to press. Reporting by The New York Times suggests that it wasn’t until the Facebook board meeting held September 6, 2017 that board audit committee chairman, Erskin Bowles, became aware of Facebook’s internal awareness of the extent to which Russian operatives had utilized the Facebook and Instagram platforms for influence campaigns in the United States. As this Article goes to press, the degree to which the allure of advertising revenues blinded Facebook to their complicit role in offering the highest bidder access to Facebook users is not yet fully known. This Article can not be a complete chapter in the corporate governance challenge of managing, monitoring, and oversight of individual privacy issues and content integrity on prominent social media platforms. The full extent of Facebook’s experience is just now becoming known, with new revelations yet to come. All interested parties: Facebook users; shareholders; the board of directors at Facebook; government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Congress must now figure out what has transpired and what to do about it. These and other revelations have resulted in a crisis for Facebook. American democracy has been and continues to be under attack. This article contributes to the literature by providing background and an account of what is known to date and posits recommendations for corrective action.

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

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.

The US 2016 presidential election & Russia’s troll farms

ABSTRACTThe Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) prosecuted an online campaign to undermine the 2016 US presidential election. It sought to accentuate existing social conflicts to affect the electoral behaviour of select groups. However, the IRA’s actual effect on the election outcomes, as assessed through its effect on its specifically targeted regions, was minimal. Nonetheless, the Kremlin successfully exploited the shock of Trump’s victory to exaggerate the apparent effect of Russian intervention. By seemingly fecklessly denying an apparently successful covert action, Moscow further challenged the legitimacy of the US election and degraded the coherence of US strategic decision making.

Governance of the Facebook Privacy Crisis

In November 2018, The New York Times ran a front-page story describing how Facebook covered up knowledge and disclosure of Russian-linked activity and exploitation resulting in Kremlin led disruption of the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, through the use of global hate campaigns and propaganda warfare. By mid-December 2018, it becomes clear that the Russian efforts leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections were much more extensive than previously thought. Two studies conducted for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), by: (1) Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika; and (2) New Knowledge, provide considerable new information and analysis about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) influence operations targeting American citizens. By early 2019 it has become apparent that a number of influential and successful high growth social media platforms have been used by nation states for propaganda purposes. Over two years earlier, Russia was called out by the U.S. intelligence community for their meddling with the 2016 American presidential elections. The extent to which prominent social media platforms has been used either willingly or without their knowledge by foreign powers continue to be investigated as this Article goes to press. Reporting by The New York Times suggests that it wasn’t until the Facebook board meeting held September 6, 2017 that board audit committee Chair Erskin Bowles became aware of Facebook’s internal awareness of the extent to which Russian operatives had utilized the Facebook and Instagram platforms for influence campaigns in the United States. The degree to which the allure of advertising revenues blinded Facebook to their complicit role in offering access to Facebook users to the highest bidder is not known at this time. This Article will not be a complete chapter in the corporate governance challenge of managing, monitoring, and oversight of individual privacy issues and content integrity on prominent social media platforms. The full extent of Facebook’s experience is just now becoming known, with new revelations yet to come. All interested parties: Facebook users; shareholders; the board of directors at Facebook; government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Congress, must now figure out what has transpired and what to do about it. Senator Warren’s presidential campaign has also placed billboards visible to the commuter trains traveling from San Francisco to the heart of Silicon Valley reading, “Break Up Big Tech.” Hers is just one voice in a growing chorus of political leaders reacting to privacy demands from constituents framed as an antitrust remedy. These and other revelations have resulted in a crisis for Facebook, the leading global social media platform. American democracy has been and continues to be under attack. This article contributes to the literature by providing background and an account of what is known to date and posits recommendations for corrective action.

Reverse engineering Russian Internet Research Agency tactics through network analysis

Reverse engineering Russian Internet Research Agency tactics through network analysis

Measuring the effect of Russian Internet Research Agency information operations in online conversations

Measuring the effect of Russian Internet Research Agency information operations in online conversations

“THE RUSSIANS ARE HACKING MY BRAIN!” investigating Russia's internet research agency twitter tactics during the 2016 United States presidential campaign

This study analyzed tweets from handles associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency in an effort to better understand the tactics employed by that organization on the social media platform Twitter in their attempt to influence U.S. political discourse and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We sampled tweets from the month preceding the election and analyzed to understand the qualitative nature of these tweets as well as quantitative differences between how types of IRA Twitter accounts communicated. Seven categories of tweet behavior were identified: attack left, support right, attack right, support left, attack media, attack civil institutions, and camouflage. While camouflage was the most common type of tweet (52.6%), descriptive analyses showed it was followed by attack left (12%) and support right (7%). A variety of quantitative differences were shown between how account types behaved.