Russian-Funded Social Media Accounts Fueled Division in 2016

Twitter recently announced that they will let nearly 700,000 users that they interacted with accounts identified as part of a propaganda campaign financed by the Russian government in 2016.

Unless you have seen the process taking place in real time, it is difficult to understand how bots (automated social media accounts), trolls (real individuals aggressively attempting to sow division or discredit experts), and sock puppets (persona accounts run by a real person who is not the person portrayed in the account profile) can spread divisive messages, silence debate, and use abuse and harassment to push political issues in a particular direction.
Once you have seen it in real time, it is clear how influential Russian government-financed troll,  bot, and sock puppet activity split American voters into angry, isolated camps with little inclination or ability to bridge divides and find consensus.
A team of researchers at the University of Washington examined  Twitter discourse related to #BlackLivesMatter and police-related shooting events in 2016, and their discoveries have broad and important implications for how Americans can combat the onslaught of divisive messaging and disinformation.
One important discovery is that the groups on the two “sides” of the issue were quite separate, with almost no overlap in retweets or conversation. The researchers found that Russian accounts identified as originating at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg  - a Russian government-financed troll farm - were clearly working in both pro-Black Lives Matter and anti-Black Lives Matter groups.

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The diagrams tell the story. The first shows the isolation of the two groups - people in each group interact primarily with others who express the same views. The second diagram shows Russian-Internet Research Agency identified accounts in orange. It is clear that Russian paid accounts were very active in the separate groups, amplifying divisive messages and increasing division and disagreement.
The researchers conclude:
“In this paper, we have located RU-IRA-affiliated troll accounts in the retweet network of a politically polarized conversation surrounding race and shootings in the United States. Our findings suggest that troll accounts contributed content to polarized information networks, likely serving to accentuate disagreement and foster division. Furthermore, our findings imply that the troll accounts gained a platform in a domestic conversation, suggesting a calculated form of media manipulation that exploits on the crowd-sourced nature of social media.”
Two articles from the University of Washington research group can be found here.

Thanks to Kate Starbird of the University of Washington for sharing this research on Twitter.

http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Stewart_Starbird_Drawing_the_Lines_of_Contention-final.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf

An article about the announcement by Twitter about notifying users that they interacted with Russian-financed propaganda accounts can be found here.
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/twitter-tells-677000-users-they-were-conned-by-russias-u-s-election-propaganda

Angry Twitter bird image by Roweig at Deviant Art