Analyzing Twitter Users' Behavior Before and After Contact by the Internet Research Agency

TL;DR

This study investigates how Twitter users' behavior changed after contact from IRA accounts, revealing significant behavioral shifts, especially among users who engaged with IRA, highlighting the influence of misinformation campaigns.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of user behavior before and after IRA contact, revealing the extent of behavioral change and engagement with political content.

Findings

Users showed significant behavioral changes post-IRA contact.

Engaged users exhibited greater behavioral shifts.

Behavioral metrics such as tweet count and sentiment were affected.

Abstract

Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The goal of this research is to understand whether general Twitter users changed their behavior in the year following first contact from an IRA account. We compare the before and after behavior of contacted users to determine whether there were differences in their mean tweet count, the sentiment of their tweets, and the frequency and sentiment of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump or @HillaryClinton. Our results indicate that users overall exhibited statistically significant changes in behavior across most of these metrics, and that those users that engaged with the IRA generally showed greater changes in behavior.