Russia's Twitter Trolls

An exhaustive study was conducted on the social media presences of the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg engaged with online influence operations on behalf of Russian interests. Two professors at Clemson University released all tweets associated with IRA accounts and categorized them by type. The two major categories that these tweets fell into were tweets that were either not in English or were mimicking right wing trolls, which were often virulently anti-immigrant.

One of the biggest takeaways from the study: the activity of these accounts increased after the 2016 presidential election, implying that their aim was not just to influence the 2016 presidential elections but the wider political conversation on Twitter.