This bar graph organizes from highest to lowest the frequency of the 198 different tags that the Russians used throughout the three years of ads in this dataset. The 25 most frequently used tags shed some light on the IRA’s tactics
For one, it’s evident that they chose race as the primary wedge to divide the American people. This is corroborated by the fact that nearly 2000 of the ads referred to race in some form and that four of the IRA’s highly divisive accounts—Secured Borders, Blacktivist, Heart of Texas, and Being Patriotic—had between them close to a million followers (Benkler et al 242). The divisive ads amplified the echo chamber effect of social media, whereby the content you see is curated—either by the user or by Facebook’s algorithms—to match your interests and beliefs. By cloistering people into separate closed systems that do not really interact with one another, the IRA ads fostered distrust of the other side and facilitated an intensification of belief within the echo chambers, which created more distrust and cloistering, and so on in a vicious cycle.
This graph is otherwise informative because it illustrates how the IRA mobilized affect to suit their purposes. I thought at the outset of this project that fear and anger would be the primary emotions used by the Russians to incite discord, but the most frequent affective tag is joy. Anger, sadness, and fear do appear frequently, but just outside the top 25 we also find humor and love each with over 200 tags. I believe this hints at another facet of the IRA’s strategy.
The Data & Society report, “The Oxygen of Amplification,” describes how the style guide for The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, encourages its trolls to deliberately intersperse “the vicious and the mundane” because this tactic “helps ease readers into a white supremacist mindset without hitting them over the head with explicit bigotry" (Phillips 28). Although the tactics of the IRA and U.S. white supremacists are not entirely isomorphic, we see the same juxtaposition of inflammatory material with the mundane or the uplifting. Like the right wing trolls of the U.S., the IRA seemed to implicitly understand that unrelenting vitriol is a turnoff to most people. By interspersing scaremongering with posts that were designed to elicit positive affective responses in Facebook users, the IRA made their fake identities seem more believable, and they cultivated a false sense of community within the echo chambers of their pages.
So now let's turn to the image gallery to see some examples of the range of ads used by the IRA.