ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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35 citing papers in PubMed.
- State-sponsored agenda setting: Measuring the impact of narrative laundering.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects.Science advances · 2026Article
- How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Targeted digital voter suppression efforts likely decrease voter turnout.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Quantifying Bot Impact: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Complexity and Uncertainty in Online Political Communication Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The role of social media ads for election outcomes: Evidence from the 2021 German election.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Quantifying the vulnerabilities of the online public square to adversarial manipulation tactics.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Temporal dynamics of coordinated online behavior: Stability, archetypes, and influence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index Dataset.Scientific data · 2023Article
- The attitudinal space framework: Embracing the multidimensionality of attitudinal diversity.iScience · 2023Article
- Realtime user ratings as a strategy for combatting misinformation: an experimental study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The Relationship Between Social Media Use and Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation.Political behavior · 2023Article
- Detecting bots in social-networks using node and structural embeddings.Journal of big data · 2023Article
- Investigating coordinated account creation using burst detection and network analysis.Journal of big data · 2023Article
- Article
- Cause and effect: On the antecedents and consequences of conspiracy theory beliefs.Current opinion in psychology · 2022Review
- Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study-especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election-as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.