Social media platforms have been playing an important role in democracy. The ability to reach millions of users with a single Tweet, or Facebook post, is a simple way to get a meesage across. This is why foreign actors have used social media platforms to try to influence elections. In the United States, the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) tried to influence the 2016 presidential election on Twitter. While Twitter deleted their accounts once they were identified, there have been lots of work in both the public and private sector to understand their impact. A lot of these pieces of work concluded that the IRA behavior on Twitter had no impact on users. Unlike prior work, we analyzed the before and after behavior of the users contacted by the agency, and actually did find a difference in their behavior.
Student
Rhett Hanscom