Category: Article Share

“We collected a dataset with

over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between

September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct

users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified

Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all

users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables

us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative

with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-

sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced

36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content

originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. 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 ide-

ologically 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.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291