Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign

Abstract

Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S. Congress investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, with Russia accused of, among other things, using trolls (malicious accounts created for the purpose of manipulation) and bots (automated accounts) to spread misinformation and politically biased information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulation campaign, taking a closer look at users who re-shared the posts produced on Twitter by the Russian troll accounts publicly disclosed by U.S. Congress investigation. We collected a dataset with over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and November 9, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct users. This dataset includes accounts associated with the identified Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the users' ideology based on the news sources they shared, to classify a large number of them as liberal or conservative with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Russian trolls significantly more often than liberals and produced 36 times more tweets. Additionally, most of the troll content originated in, and was shared by users from Southern states. Using state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about 4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ideologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.