Abstract

Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: (The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign) Page 1 ANALYZING THE DIGITAL TRACES OF POLITICAL MANIPULATION: (THE 2016 RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE TWITTER CAMPAIGN) Adam Badawy, Emilio Ferrara, Kristina Lerman University of Southern California Page 2 BACKGROUND • Studying large scale online political manipulation campaign • US Presidential Elections • Trolls Page 3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS • What was the role of the users’ political ideology? • What was the role of social bots? • Did trolls especially succeed in specific areas of the US? • Can we predict which users will become susceptible to Russian trolls? • What features distinguish users who spread trolls’ messages? Page 4 DATA COLLECTION • Twitter dataset: 43.7 M tweets posted by 5.7 M users from 15th of September to 9th of November 2016. • Data collected using …

Date

January 15, 2026

Authors

Adam Badawy, Emilio Ferrara, Kristina Lerman

Journal

The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign