“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.”