Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s Impact on the Political Attitudes and Behaviors of American Twitter Users in Late 2017

• Activity Number: 283 - Statistical Analysis on Social Media Misinformation Campaigns
• Type: Topic-Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 11, 2021 : 1:30 PM to 3:20 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Brian Guay* and Alexander Volfovsky and Christopher Bail and Sunshine Hillygus and Emily Maloney and Friedolin Merhout and Aidan Combs and Deen Freelon
• Companies: Duke University and Duke University and Duke University and Duke University and Duke University and University of Copenhagen and Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Keywords: misinformation; social media; political polarization; computational social science; Twitter

Abstract

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the U.S. 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 month 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.