Abstract

Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S. Congress investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, with Russia accused of, among other things, using trolls (malicious accounts created for the purpose of manipulation) and bots (automated accounts) to spread misinformation and politically biased information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulation campaign, taking a closer look at users who re-shared the posts produced on Twitter by the Russian troll accounts publicly disclosed by U.S. Congress investigation. We collected a dataset with over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between …

Date

February 12, 2018

Authors

Adam Badawy, Emilio Ferrara, Kristina Lerman

Conference

Proceedings of The international conference series on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM-2018)

Publisher

arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04291