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Social Media Sockpuppets

Russian Media Manipulation of the 2016 Election Via Facebook Ads 

Matthew Swanson | Digital Humanities 201

As a worker sits down in front of her computer, she knows that she has a long day ahead of her. 12 hours long, in fact. And in that timespan, she must create 15 social media posts and comment on 200 posts. Is this person an employee of some Silicon Valley startup or digital marketing team? No, in fact, she is an employee of the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed media manipulation and disinformation organization operating out of St. Petersburg (see Adrian Chen's article for further details on the laborers of the IRA). The IRA has been at work for years, spreading pro-Putin propaganda and disinformation in Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, and their reach has expanded in the intervening years. From 2015 through 2018, the IRA managed a coordinated campaign to infiltrate American social media feeds with the ultimate goal of sowing discord and eroding American faith in its media and institutions.

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg to your Facebook newsfeed here in the United States, this is the story of how Russian media manipulators may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and deepened existing fractures in the American social body. I argue that this was achieved by weaponizing affect and narrative and by exploiting the platform architecture of Facebook and other social media networks to facilitate the dissemination of disinformation to wide swathes of the population.

First, I begin with a prefatory note about this dataset. The University of Maryland dataset contains 3,012 records of Facebook ads created by the IRA, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Facebook identified over 80,000 posts created by Russian troll factories on its pages and accounts. So obviously this dataset and the data visualizations I have created from it will not encapsulate the entirety of the IRA’s efforts to manipulate American Facebook users. But it should still be a significant sample size from which to draw inferences about how the IRA operates and what they achieved.