Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Misinformation has been shown not to easily change beliefs or political voting behavior.
“Additionally, misinformation has been shown not to easily change beliefs or political voting behavior (Bail et al., 2020; Guess et al., 2020).”
From Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media. (2024) · cites this paper as Bail et al., 2020
The Conclusion reports no substantial effect of interactions with Russian IRA accounts on political attitudes among frequent partisan Twitter users in late 2017. But it explicitly says the study could not assess voting behavior, and its findings do not establish the broader claim for misinformation generally. (LLM, conf=0.90)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredA recent paper followed over 1,200 American Twitter users for 1 month in late 2017 and found that only a small fraction of users interacted with Russian trolls, and they did not observe any change in partisan attitude during that time among these users.
“A recent paper followed over 1,200 American Twitter users for the course of 1 month in late 2017. The authors found that only a small fraction of users interacted with Russian trolls, and they did not observe any change in partisan attitude during that time among these users (68).”
From Troll and divide: the language of online polarization (2022) · cites this paper as [68]
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References 30 · Cited by 224
Research works printed but not linked: 9
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- [5]Phillips W., This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015).
- [10]Tucker J., “Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A Review of the scientific literature” (Tech. Rep., Hewlett Foundation, Menlo Park, CA, 2018).
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- [15]Stewart L. G., Arif A., Starbird K., “ Examining trolls and polarization with a retweet network” in Proceedings of WSDM Workshop on Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web (MIS2) (ACM, New York, 2018).
- [16]Berelson B. R., Lazarsfeld P. F., McPhee W. N., McPhee W. N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954).
- [23]Hahn P. R., Murray J. S., Carvalho C., Bayesian regression tree models for causal inference: Regularization, confounding, and heterogeneous effects. arXiv:1706.09523 (23 May 2019). · arXiv
- [24]Lazer D., Life in the network: The coming age of computational social science. Science 323, 721– 723 (2009). 19197046 PMC2745217
- [25]Bail C. A., Replication data for "Assessing the Russian Internet Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of U.S. Twitter users in late 2017" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/UATZBA. Deposited 7 November 2019. PMC6955293 31767743 · DOI
- Authors
- Bail, C. A., Guay, B., Maloney, E., Combs, A., Hillygus, D. S., Merhout, F., Freelon, D., & Volfovsky, A.
- Affiliations
- Duke University (US)
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bail, Christopher A.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2019-11-25
- Volume
- 117
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 243-250
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC6955293
- OpenAlex
- W2991581987
- Cited by
- 224
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 60 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 29 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 55.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1756140, 1644868)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
- Keywords
- political polarization, political attitudes, political behavior, Twitter users, 2016 US presidential election, computational social science, Russian disinformation
- MeSH terms
- Attitude, Behavior, Communication, Humans, Organizations, Politics, Russia, Social Sciences, United States, Internet, Social Media
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