The study, led by researchers from Duke University and published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to directly measure how tweets from Russian agents affected the political views of the Americans who encountered them. The researchers gave a panel of U.S. Twitter users a survey on their political attitudes in October 2017, then asked them the same questions again a month later. Next they looked at which of those users had interacted with accounts controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or IRA, in between taking the two surveys. They found that those who encountered IRA tweets showed no significant, discernible change in their political opinions, attitudes, or degree of political engagement as a result.
That finding is noteworthy in itself, because while much has been written on the scale, reach, and tactics of Russian bots and trolls seeking to interfere in U.S. politics, there has been little to no peer-reviewed research quantifying their actual impact. That’s notoriously hard to measure, leaving previous studies to grasp at murkier metrics like the number of likes or retweets Russian posts received. The authors were able to do so only because they had already been running a survey of Twitter users’ political views for other reasons, and because Twitter last year published an archive of foreign information operations on its platform. They found that not only did users not change their ideology in response to IRA tweets, they also showed no change in their degree of partisanship, political engagement, or anger at the other side.
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