Do I sound American?: How message attributes of Internet Research Agency (IRA) disinformation relate to Twitter engagement

Jiyoun Suk; Josephine Lukito; Min-Hsin Su; Sang Jung Kim; Chau Tong; Zhongkai Sun; Prathusha Sarma

doi:10.5117/CCR2022.2.008.SUK

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Do I sound American?: How message attributes of Internet Research Agency (IRA) disinformation relate to Twitter engagement

Journal article

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Do I sound American?: How message attributes of Internet Research Agency (IRA) disinformation relate to Twitter engagement

Jiyoun Suk, Josephine Lukito, Min-Hsin Su, Sang Jung Kim, Chau Tong, Zhongkai Sun and Prathusha Sarma

Computational communication research, Vol.4(2), pp.590-628

10/01/2022

DOI: 10.5117/CCR2022.2.008.SUK

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Abstract

Ongoing research into how states coordinate foreign disinformation campaign has raised concerns over social media’s influence on democracies. One example is the spread of Russian disinformation in the 2016 US presidential election. Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts have been known to deliver messages with strategic attempts and political goals. We use publicly available IRA Twitter data created during and after the 2016 US election campaign (2016 and 2017) to examine the nature of strategic message features of foreign-sponsored online disinformation and their social media sharing. We use computational approaches to identify unique syntactic features of online disinformation tweets from IRA compared to American Twitter corpora, reflecting their functional and situational differences. More importantly, we examine what message features in IRA tweets across syntax, topic, and sentiment were associated with more sharing (retweets). Implications are discussed.

Details

Title: Subtitle: Do I sound American?: How message attributes of Internet Research Agency (IRA) disinformation relate to Twitter engagement
Creators: Jiyoun Suk - University of Connecticut
Josephine Lukito - The University of Texas at Austin
Min-Hsin Su - University of Wisconsin–Madison
Sang Jung Kim - University of Wisconsin–Madison
Chau Tong - Cornell University
Zhongkai Sun - Amazon Alexa AI
Prathusha Sarma - Curai
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Computational communication research, Vol.4(2), pp.590-628
DOI: 10.5117/CCR2022.2.008.SUK
ISSN: 2665-9085
eISSN: 2665-9085
Language: English
Date published: 10/01/2022
Academic Unit: Center for Social Science Innovation; School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Record Identifier: 9984460321802771

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