Researchers find ‘state-sponsored agenda building’
On one day during 2016 campaign, Russian operatives blasted 18,000 tweets
On the eve of one of the newsiest days of the 2016 presidential election season, a group of Russian operatives fired off tweets at a furious pace, about a dozen each minute. By the time they finished, more than 18,000 had been sent through cyberspace toward unwitting American voters, making it the busiest day by far in a disinformation operation whose aftermath is still roiling U.S. politics.
The reason for this burst of activity on Oct. 6, 2016, documented in a new trove of 3 million Russian tweets collected by Clemson University researchers, is a mystery that has generated intriguing theories but no definitive explanation.
The theories attempt to make sense of how such a heavy flow of Russian disinformation might be related to what came immediately after, on Oct.7.
This was the day when WikiLeaks began releasing embarrassing emails that Russian intelligence operatives had stolen from the campaign chairman for Democrat Hillary Clinton, revealing sensitive internal conversations that would stir controversy for weeks.
Could the Russian disinformation teams have gotten advanced notice of the Wikileaks release, sending the operatives into overdrive to shape public reactions to the news? And what do the operatives’ actions that day reveal about Russia’s strategy and tactics now that Americans are heading into another crucial election in just a few months?
These questions flow from the work of a pair of Clemson University researchers who have assembled the largest trove of Russian disinformation tweets available so far.
The database includes tweets between February 2014 and May 2018, all from accounts that Twitter has identified as part of the disinformation campaign waged by the Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and owned by a Putin associate.
Collectively the new data offer yet more evidence of the coordinated nature of Russia’s attempt to manipulate the American election. The Clemson researchers dubbed it “state-sponsored agenda building.”
Last week’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers by Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear that the hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and their distribution through WikiLeaks was a meticulous operation.
U.S. officials with knowledge of information that the government has gathered on the Russian operation said they had yet to establish a clear connection between WikiLeaks and the troll accounts that would prove they were coordinating around release of campaign emails.
Twitter declined to comment on the Clemson research, which has not yet been published.