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Abstract
Though nation-states have long utilized disinformation to influence foreign audiences, Russia’s 2015 to 2017 campaign against the U.S.—executed by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) —is unique in its complexity and distribution through the digital communication ecology. The following study explores IRA activity on three social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, to understand how activities on these sites were temporally coordinated. Using a VAR analysis with Granger Causality tests, results show that IRA Reddit activity granger caused IRA Twitter activity within a one-week lag. One explanation may be that the Internet Research Agency is trial ballooning on one platform (i.e., Reddit) to figure out which messages are optimal to distribute on other social media (i.e., Twitter).
Data availability statement
The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://github.com/jlukito/ira_3media and https://github.com/jlukito/ira_3media/blob/master/ts_data.csv
Open Scholarship
This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://github.com/jlukito/ira_3media and https://github.com/jlukito/ira_3media/blob/master/ts_data.csv
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1661889.
Notes
1. This definition is taken from Fetzer’s (Citation2004), who describes disinformation as, “the distribution, assertion, or dissemination of false, mistaken, or misleading information in an intentional, deliberate, or purposeful effort to mislead, deceive or confuse” (p. 231).
2. The audience can be delineated by platform use, country, demographic, or another attribute. The delineation determines the scope of a campaign and allows disinformation actors to tailor strategies for that audience.
3. Libicki’s (Citation1995) typology would identify the IRA’s campaign as a form of psychological warfare, or a tactic to fatigue hearts and minds.
4. CAMEO (Conflict And Mediation Event Observation) is a detailed coding scheme to identify different event-types. Each event-type (e.g., diplomatic cooperation, military posturing, war) is given an identifying number. For more information, please view the codebook: http://data.gdeltproject.org/documentation/CAMEO.Manual.1.1b3.pdf .
5. The term “owned” and “paid” follow public relations strategy distinctions between paying for attention and using one’s own media platforms to garner attention (see Burcher, Citation2012).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Josephine Lukito
Josephine Lukito is a Mass Communication Ph.D candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with minors in Political Science and English Linguistics.