The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a Russian entity that runs social network information operations for the Kremlin. The IRA is known for the systematic creation and operation of fake accounts on social media sites in order to promote the states interest abroad.The Muller Report on interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election highlights the actions of the IRA took to sow political discord on divisive domestic issues. Twitter proved to be a successful platform for the IRA, with a report from twitter showing that 1.4 million people interacted with Russian trolls in the lead up to the 2016 election.
To promote research into disinformation, Twitter has released datasets containing the tweets of identified accounts created for state sponsored information operations. The data visualized below come from a random sampling of english tweets from the 3,613 accounts and 10 Million tweets affiliated with the IRA.
By sorting the data into unique user ID we can see when each IRA run account was created.
A large portion of these accounts were created years before the election day in 2016. Showing that Russia was not afraid to play the long game in their attempt to influence US politics.
Writing 10M tweets sounds like a lot of work. Lets look at how much of the IRA's content was created by retweeting existing sentiments compared to writing their own hot takes.
The tweets talked about subjects ranging from sports to #blacklivesmatter protests. A large portion of the content was not political. But when it was, Trump was the center of discussion. Though members of the democratic party were not far behind.
We used an open source natural language processing tool called TextBlob to run a sentiment analysis on the tweets. The results can show if the Kremlin was trying to promote a positive or a negative view of the two 2016 candidates.
The results suggest that the primary strategy of the IRA was not to blindly support Trump, but rather promote dischord about both candidates.