The Linking Practices of Russian Internet Research Agency Twitter Trolls

It’s the final session of the iCS Symposium before we wrap up, and we start with Yevgeniy Golovchenko and a study of Russian trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, this project focusses on the accounts run by the now infamous Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), that have now been uncovered by a number of mainstream social media platforms.

Twitter, in fact, has published a list of the suspected IRA accounts it has detected, and it is now possible to test existing social media datasets for their presence. But what was the aim of these accounts’ activities: to support Donald Trump in the election, or to support partisan forces on both sides of politics in order to sow discord and facilitate the further breakdown of U.S. politics culture?

The present project works with some 100,000 tweets from over 1,000 RA accounts. Some 40,000 of these tweets contain links, and in particular feature 11,000 links to news media and 6,000 links to YouTube. What ideologies do these links promote, then?

The news links often point both to liberal, moderate, and conservative news sources; the YouTube links, however, overwhelmingly (4,800) promote conservative channels. How may we explain this discrepancy? Across the accounts, there is some division of labour: some consistently link to conservative news media as well as conservative YouTube channels, while a smaller number link to liberal media as well as liberal channels. A further group, however, links to more liberal and moderate news sources as well as to highly conservative YouTube content: this may indicate attempts to attract a liberal or mainstream audience of followers and then insert conservative propaganda into their feeds.

Further, the content becomes overwhelmingly conservative towards the final weeks of the campaign; this too may be seen as an attempt to exert last-ditch influence on liberal or moderate voters following these accounts. This may be understood as a form of cross-platform pre-propaganda, directing Twitter users to hyperpartisan political content on YouTube.