We estimate, for example, that at least 32 million US Twitter users were potentially exposed to posts from Russia-sponsored accounts in the eight months leading up to the 2016 election. One reason to expect that foreign influence campaigns could affect the attitudes and behaviors of social media users is their seemingly large scale and reach. Theoretically, there are good reasons to expect both why foreign influence campaigns on social media might succeed and why they might fail. These survey-linked social media data allow us to both quantify the distribution and scale of ordinary US users’ exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts, and to estimate the relationship between exposure to these accounts and users’ positions on policy issues, political polarization, and voting behavior in the 2016 election. We link longitudinal survey data from a sample of US Twitter users with data from those respondents’ social media feeds that were collected during the 2016 campaign. In this article, we investigate the relationship between Russia’s foreign influence campaign on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election and the political attitudes and voting behavior of ordinary US social media users. Other research on foreign influence campaigns has sought to understand the structure and content of these campaigns 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, but has not assessed the relationship between exposure to content from foreign influence accounts and political attitudes, polarization, and vote choice. Yet the authors acknowledge a number of limitations: the available data are from a year after the 2016 US election occurred, cover a short one-month time window, and were collected after Twitter removed many Russian foreign influence accounts from its platform. Previous research has, for example, examined the relationship between interactions with Russian foreign influence accounts in the United States and attitudes and political behavior 12. Researchers’ understanding of the influence of the social media side of these campaigns remains unresolved, however, in large part due to the absence of the data. Social media companies once again warned that Russia-based organizations were seeking to intervene in the 2020 US presidential election 9.įoreign influence campaigns have attracted substantial popular and academic interest 10, 11, 12. The organization is accused of using social media accounts impersonating US users to polarize the US electorate and influence the attitudes and voting behavior of ordinary Americans during the 2016 US election campaign. The Internet Research Agency’s alleged efforts to undermine US democracy are now widely documented by the news media 4, US government investigators 3, 5, and researchers 6, 7, 8. An example of such a foreign intervention was the one conducted during the 2016 US election campaign by the Internet Research Agency, an organization closely linked to the Russian government 3. A number of high-profile cases have since suggested that some governments are using social media to undermine the social movements that challenge their domestic power, and to intervene in the democratic elections of their foreign adversaries 2. Governments soon recognized the collective action potential of social media, and responded by developing strategies to use these platforms for their own domestic and foreign policy goals. Yet the initial optimism that surrounded the democratizing potential of social media was short-lived. When the major social media platforms first emerged in the mid-2000s, they were credited with providing essential collective action tools for democratic activists and with spurring several high-profile social movements worldwide (e.g., Iran’s Green Wave movement, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street) 1. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |