{"id":1913922,"date":"2018-11-19T14:58:01","date_gmt":"2018-11-19T19:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=1913922"},"modified":"2018-11-19T15:02:42","modified_gmt":"2018-11-19T20:02:42","slug":"russian-trolls-local-news-1913922","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/russian-trolls-local-news-1913922\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian trolls relied on local news over fake stories in 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based group of Internet trolls, relied on local news more than it did fake news to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, according to a new analysis.<\/p>\n

“Russian trolls shared five times more local news content than they did junk news content, our research shows,” says Joshua Tucker, a professor of politics at New York University and codirector of the university’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab.<\/p>\n

“This suggests that attempts simply to fight fake news will not be enough to stop future attempts at manipulating the information environment surrounding elections on social media,” Tucker says.<\/p>\n

Trusted news sources<\/h3>\n

“We suspect that the IRA relied so heavily on local news sources because they believed that Americans trust their local media outlets more than other sources,” says Leon Yin, a research scientist at the SMaPP lab. “In fact, a Pew Research Center report from 2017 found that Americans not only trusted news from local sources more than news from national sources, but also more than from friends and family.”<\/p>\n

Just prior to the 2018 mid-term elections, Facebook announced that it had removed accounts it thought were linked to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA), a troll farm that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted for meddling in the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n

Given the IRA’s role in two US election cycles, the SMaPP researchers sought to more deeply understand the agency’s online strategy.<\/p>\n

To do so, the team analyzed all known IRA-operated Twitter accounts and examined what kind of online content the trolls shared ahead of the November 8, 2016 presidential election. Overall, it found that IRA-linked accounts shared less fake, or “junk,” news than might be expected and instead relied heavily on local news sources.<\/p>\n

Specifically, the study drew on a dataset that Twitter’s Elections Integrity Initiative shared online of more than 9 million tweets sent by approximately 3,600 IRA-linked accounts in 2016. It discarded tweets without links and accounts that posted in Russian, leaving 556 accounts that tweeted approximately 209,000 links between January 2016 and November 2016.<\/p>\n

In order to understand how troll behavior compared to legitimate behavior on Twitter, the team collected tweets from two comparison groups over the same time period: politically engaged users and random users. The sample of random Twitter users contained 1,344 accounts that tweeted approximately 106,000 links; the sample of politically engaged users encompassed 1,952 accounts that shared roughly 437,000 URLs.<\/p>\n

Among SMaPP’s findings were the following:<\/p>\n