Abstract

A set of “stylized facts” about state-backed influence operations now circulates across journalism, policy, and the peer-reviewed literature: that they are monolithic troll armies; that they win by weaponizing moral-emotional language; that they manufacture their own virality; that they learn and optimize against feedback; and that they have become indistinguishable from ordinary users. Most rest on single-campaign studies, uncontrolled comparisons, and large-sample significance reported without baselines or multiple-comparison control, and are rarely re-tested. We assemble complete, government-attributed archives of seven state campaigns (25,076,853 tweets from 9,071 accounts) with a matched organic-user baseline for five of them, and re-test all five claims under one protocol: pre-registration, Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery control, permutation nulls, a future-reception placebo, and a takedown-snapshot decomposition. Scoped to these campaigns, every claim weakens or reverses. The operations are narratively segregated, thinly staffed production desks, not a unified army; an organic moral-contagion law fails to replicate in any of them, and a meaningless placebo predicts engagement as well; internal amplification supplies only 0.10%–5.31% of top-percentile reach, the rest captured from an external audience the operation does not control; behavior is scripted, with rare apparent feedback mean-reverting toward baseline; and while their per-account language has drifted off the 2016 “troll” fingerprint, they still coordinate 7–70× more tightly than matched real users—a regularity a frozen re-test reproduces, with the language-drift and …

Date

2026

Authors

Emilio Ferrara

Publisher

Preprints