Inauthentic Newsfeeds and Agenda Setting in a Coordinated Inauthentic Information Operation
Abstract: The 2015-2017 Russian Internet Research Agency’s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social-media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic “Newsfeeds” made up a large, under-analyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1000 tweets from the IRA Newsfeeds and a matched set of real news sources from those same cities with up to five labels indicating the tweet represents a world in unrest and, if so, of what sort. We train a natural-language classifier to extend these labels to 268k IRA tweets and 1.13m control tweets. Compared to the controls, tweets from the IRA were 34 percent more likely to represent unrest, especially crime and identity danger, and this difference jumped to about twice as likely in the months immediately before the election. Agenda-setting by media is well known and well- studied, but this weaponization by a coordinated information operation is novel.
