Assessing the Activities of Russian Propaganda Accounts on Twitter

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Johan Farkas, whose focus is on the activities of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, described as the Russian ‘troll factory’ and indicted for its involvement in Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

There are three forms of propaganda that have been identified in past literature: ‘white’ propaganda has a known source; ‘grey’ propaganda has an obfuscated source; and ‘black’ propaganda claims to be from a legitimate source but isn’t. Is this a useful classification in this context? Do the processes of propaganda dissemination that the literature has identified still operate in the same way in present-day media and social environments? And what communities does such propaganda target now?

The present study focusses especially on the user accounts that have been found to share propaganda – but this is complicated by the fact that many such accounts have now been deleted by Twitter. But many may still be found in historical datasets or in the Wayback Machine, and datasets of at least some of their tweets are also still available from a range of sources. The study covered 826 user profiles, which is more than one fifth of the IRA accounts that Twitter has publicly acknowledged and removed. These were classified according to the white/grey/black propaganda framework, and the nature of their propaganda activities was also assessed. In particular, the project created a ‘fearmongering’ and a ‘populism’ score for each account.

Most of the account profiles were found to show evidence of ‘black’ propaganda, masking their real origins by stating U.S. locations and timezones. White and grey propaganda followed; and a similar proportion was observed for the tweets posted by the accounts. Fearmongering and populism was stronger amongst black and grey propaganda accounts. Many of the accounts were targetting very distinct communities: they present as conservative patriots; Black Lives Matter archivists; and local news outlets.

Local news outlet accounts exclusively tweeted content from established local news sources, but make a very skewed selection of such content: they focus especially on crime, disease, accidents, and natural disasters. The aim here may be to stoke fear and create anxiety.