Russia's 2016 Twitter Campaign Was Strongly Pro-Gun, With Echoes Of The NRA
Russia's 2016 Twitter Campaign Was Strongly Pro-Gun, With Echoes Of The NRA
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/21/648803459/russias-2016-twitter-campaign-was-strongly-pro-gun-with-echoes-of-the-nra
Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.
On every issue, from race to healthcare, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the "Internet Research Agency" sought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.
Except when it came to guns and the NRA.
That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the IRA, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.
Last year Twitter notified the House Intelligence Committee about thousands of accounts it linked to the Internet Research Agency, and deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts.
But Clemson University professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren realized that one of Clemson's research labs had incidentally archived the tweets. This saved a record of Russian influence operations online from 2012 to 2018, with most of the tweets occurring from 2015 to 2017.
They provided NPR with a list of posts made by the Internet Research Agency that related to guns and the National Rifle Association. That data was then analyzed to assess the Russian troll farm's messaging and its influence.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKvprUOdMx9PqO1OIFS1ACB-se58w2dn3BWqDsmx4PBty-JLTm6XsIoi1jFF5S65XyZOAAb4UAhqCb/pub?output=xlsx
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The data analysis showed that the Internet Research Agency copied messaging and, at times, specific language from the National Rifle Association.http://npr.org/649209429
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