Dataset Information

Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017.

ABSTRACT: There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study-especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election-as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.

SUBMITTER: Bail CA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6955293 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017.

Bail Christopher A CA Guay Brian B Maloney Emily E Combs Aidan A Hillygus D Sunshine DS Merhout Friedolin F Freelon Deen D Volfovsky Alexander A

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20191125 1

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged w ...[more]

PMID: 31767743

Similar Datasets

Project description:The American Men's Internet Survey (AMIS) is an annual Web-based behavioral survey of men who have sex with men (MSM) who live in the United States. This Rapid Surveillance Report describes the fifth cycle of data collection (July 2017 to November 2017: AMIS 2017). The key indicators are the same as those previously reported for past AMIS cycles (December 2013 to May 2014: AMIS 2013; November 2014 to April 2015: AMIS 2014; September 2015 to April 2016: AMIS 2015; and September 2016 to February 2017: AMIS 2016). The AMIS methodology has not substantively changed since AMIS 2016. The MSM were recruited from a variety of websites using banner advertisements and email blasts. Additionally, participants from AMIS 2016 who agreed to be recontacted for future research were emailed a link to AMIS 2017. Men were eligible to participate if they were aged ?15 years, resided in the United States, provided a valid US zone improvement plan code, and reported ever having sex with a man or identified as gay or bisexual. The analysis was limited to those who reported having oral or anal sex with a male partner in the past 12 months. We examined demographic and recruitment characteristics using multivariable regression modeling (P<.05) stratified by the participants' self-reported HIV status. The AMIS 2017 round of data collection resulted in 10,049 completed surveys from MSM representing every US state, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Participants were mainly non-Hispanic white, over the age of 40 years, living in the Southern United States and urban areas, and recruited from geospatial social networking websites. The plurality (4485/10,049, 44.6%) of participants was in the 40 years and older age group, followed by the youngest age group, 15 to 24 years (2726/10,049, 27.1%). Self-reported HIV prevalence was 9.6% (964/10,049). Compared with HIV-negative or unknown-status participants, HIV-positive participants were more likely to have had anal sex without a condom with a male partner in the past 12 months (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.21, 95% CI 1.86-2.63) and more likely to have had anal sex without a condom with a serodiscordant or an unknown-status partner (aOR 3.13, 95% CI 2.71-3.62). The reported use of marijuana in the past 12 months was higher among HIV-positive participants than HIV-negative or unknown status participants (aOR 1.29, 95% CI 1.09-1.51). The reported use of methamphetamines and other illicit substances in the past 12 months was higher among HIV-positive participants than HIV-negative or unknown status participants (aOR 5.57, 95% CI 4.38-7.09 and aOR 1.93, 95% CI 1.65-2.27, respectively). Most HIV-negative or unknown status participants (7330/9085, 80.7%) reported ever taking an HIV test previously, and 60.6% (5504/9085) reported undergoing HIV testing in the past 12 months. HIV-positive participants were more likely to report testing and diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections than HIV-negative or unknown status participants (aOR 2.85, 95% CI 2.46-3.31 and aOR 2.73, 95% CI 2.29-3.26, respectively).

Project description:BackgroundDigital spaces, and in particular social networking sites, are becoming increasingly present and influential in the functioning of our democracies. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology for the data collection, the reconstruction, the analysis and the visualization of the development of a country's political landscape from Twitter data.MethodThe proposed method relies solely on the interactions between Twitter accounts and is independent of the characteristics of the shared contents such as the language of the tweets. We validate our methodology on a case study on the 2017 French presidential election (60 million Twitter exchanges between more than 2.4 million users) via two independent methods: the comparison between our automated political categorization and a human categorization based on the evaluation of a sample of 5000 profiles descriptions; the correspondence between the reconfigurations detected in the reconstructed political landscape and key political events reported in the media. This latter validation demonstrated the ability of our approach to accurately reflect the reconfigurations at play in the off-line political scene.ResultsWe built on this reconstruction to give insights into the opinion dynamics and the reconfigurations of political communities at play during a presidential election. First, we propose a quantitative description and analysis of the political engagement of members of political communities. Second, we analyze the impact of political communities on information diffusion and in particular on their role in the fake news phenomena. We measure a differential echo chamber effect on the different types of political news (fake news, debunks, standard news) caused by the community structure and emphasize the importance of addressing the meso-structures of political networks in understanding the fake news phenomena.ConclusionsGiving access to an intermediate level, between sociological surveys in the field and large statistical studies (such as those conducted by national or international organizations) we demonstrate that social networks data make it possible to qualify and quantify the activity of political communities in a multi-polar political environment; as well as their temporal evolution and reconfiguration, their structure, their alliance strategies and their semantic particularities during a presidential campaign through the analysis of their digital traces. We conclude this paper with a comment on the political and ethical implications of the use of social networks data in politics. We stress the importance of developing social macroscopes that will enable citizens to better understand how they collectively make society and propose as example the "Politoscope", a macroscope that delivers some of our results in an interactive way.

Project description:BackgroundTobacco-related content on social media is generated and propagated by opinion leaders on the Web who disseminate messages to others in their network, including followers, who then continue to spread the information. Opinion leaders can exert powerful influences on their followers' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors; yet, little is known about the demographic characteristics and tobacco use behavior of tobacco opinion leaders on the Web and their followers, compared with general Twitter users.ObjectiveIn this study, we hypothesized that opinion leaders use more tobacco products and have higher nicotine dependence than the other 2 groups (eg, followers and general Twitter users) and that followers-those who spread messages by opinion leaders-would more likely be in demographic groups that are vulnerable to tobacco marketing influence (eg, young adults and lower educational attainment).MethodsWe constructed the social networks of people who tweet about tobacco and categorized them using a combination of social network and Twitter metrics. To understand the characteristics of tobacco opinion leaders and their followers, we conducted a survey of tobacco opinion leaders, their followers, and general Twitter users. The sample included 347 opinion leaders, 567 followers, and 519 general users. The opinion leaders had a median of 1000 followers, whereas followers and general users had fewer than 600 followers.ResultsOpinion leaders were more likely than their followers to report past month use of tobacco products; followers, in turn, were more likely to report past month use of these products than general Twitter users. The followers appeared to be an especially vulnerable group; they tended to be younger (mean age 22.4 years) and have lower education compared with the opinion leaders and general users.ConclusionsFollowers of Twitter tobacco opinion leaders are a vulnerable group that might benefit from antitobacco education to counter the protobacco communications they see on social media.

Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every society and exposing the critical role of local politics in crisis response. In the United States, there has been a strong partisan divide between the Democratic and Republican party's narratives about the pandemic which resulted in polarization of individual behaviors and divergent policy adoption across regions. As shown in this case, as well as in most major social issues, strongly polarized narrative frameworks facilitate such narratives. To understand polarization and other social chasms, it is critical to dissect these diverging narratives. Here, taking the Democratic and Republican political social media posts about the pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate that a combination of computational methods can provide useful insights into the different contexts, framing, and characters and relationships that construct their narrative frameworks which individual posts source from. Leveraging a dataset of tweets from the politicians in the U.S., including the ex-president, members of Congress, and state governors, we found that the Democrats' narrative tends to be more concerned with the pandemic as well as financial and social support, while the Republicans discuss more about other political entities such as China. We then perform an automatic framing analysis to characterize the ways in which they frame their narratives, where we found that the Democrats emphasize the government's role in responding to the pandemic, and the Republicans emphasize the roles of individuals and support for small businesses. Finally, we present a semantic role analysis that uncovers the important characters and relationships in their narratives as well as how they facilitate a membership categorization process. Our findings concretely expose the gaps in the "elusive consensus" between the two parties. Our methodologies may be applied to computationally study narratives in various domains.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00308-4.

Dataset Information

Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017.

Publications

Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets