تاکتیک های توییتر آژانس تحقیقات اینترنتی
Abstract
1. The sword and the shield
2. Disinformation and the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign
3. Agenda building
4. Method
5. Qualitative coding procedures
6. Results
7. Discussion
References
Abstract
This study analyzed tweets from handles associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency in an effort to better understand the tactics employed by that organization on the social media platform Twitter in their attempt to influence U.S. political discourse and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We sampled tweets from the month preceding the election and analyzed to understand the qualitative nature of these tweets as well as quantitative differences between how types of IRA Twitter accounts communicated. Seven categories of tweet behavior were identified: attack left, support right, attack right, support left, attack media, attack civil institutions, and camouflage. While camouflage was the most common type of tweet (52.6%), descriptive analyses showed it was followed by attack left (12%) and support right (7%). A variety of quantitative differences were shown between how account types behaved.
In February 2018, the U.S. Justice Department indicted 13 Russian nationals, listing them – and the organization they worked for – as central to a Russian state effort to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election (Barrett, Horwitz, & Helderman, 2018). According to the indictment, beginning in 2014 the Internet Research Agency (IRA) of St. Petersburg – owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and widely held to be a tool of the Russian state (Shane & Mazzetti, 2018, pp. 1–۱۱) – began to sow discord in the U.S. political system. With this indictment it is by now widely accepted that the IRA played a significant, and perhaps even game-changing, role in the 2016 United States’ Presidential Election (Jamieson, 2018). At the heart of the IRA’s efforts was a sophisticated campaign using social media platforms to sow division, discontent, and disconnection with reality among US political discussions. While these efforts draw on a long history of Russian (and indeed Soviet) attempts to infiltrate US political discourse, the 2016 campaign marked a radical shift in both tactics and impact. Never before had a foreign power been able to so successfully infiltrate American democracy; never before had social media been so weaponized. Yet while general knowledge of this campaign and its goals is now widespread, details of the strategic and tactical choices made by the IRA remain far from fully documented. One narrative suggests the IRA were political opportunists, playing ideologies against one another in an effort to sow greater division and weaken both political parties (Graff, 2018).