Cornell researchers discovered Russia attempted to distract liberal voters during the 2016 presidential campaign with a seemingly innocent weapon – tweets about music and videos – taking a page from its domestic disinformation playbook.
Researchers find Russia tried to distract liberal voters during the 2016 presidential campaign with tweets about music and videos, taking from its domestic disinformation techniques https://t.co/sBeECBzhDO
— Anonymous Operations (@AnonOpsSE) April 13, 2022
The strategy is similar to tactics used by autocratic governments with control over their national media, such as Russia and China, which “flood” social media with entertainment content to distract their citizens from domestic events, such as protests, that they do not want covered.
“We’ve seen flooding as a social media strategy in both China and Russia; for example, Russia has frequently manipulated social media with regard to Ukraine over the last decade,” said political economist Alexandra Cirone, an assistant professor of government in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) who teaches a class on fake news and disinformation. “However, an autocratic country attempting to do it to a democratic country in the midst of an election – we’re in uncharted territory.” It’s amazing how well these strategies transfer.”
Cirone and Will Hobbs, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Human Ecology and government in A&S, co-wrote the paper “Asymmetric Flooding as a Tool for Foreign Influence on Social Media,” which was published on March 25 in Political Science and International Relations.
Twitter has released a dataset of more than 10 million tweets sent by 3,841 IRA accounts. These accounts represent human-controlled Russian operators, or “trolls,” as opposed to computer-controlled bots. The dataset includes apolitical content, which hasn’t been studied as much as the partisan messaging. Key words in those tweets included “hiphop,” “remix,” “rapstationradio,” “nowplaying” and “indieradioplay”. The findings underscore that entertainment content is not as innocuous as we might think, Hobbs and Cirone say.
“You might think you’re clicking on a cat meme, but really you’re potentially putting a troll network into your feed,” they say. Bad actors could be using entertainment content to distract, or pose as regular users, in the midterm elections.
