https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00464-3
Research
Suspended accounts align with the Internet Research Agency misinformation campaign to influence the 2016 US election
1
Levich Institute and Physics Departmen, City College of New York, New York, NY, USA
2
Department of Data Science, School of Statistics, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, China
3
Physics Department, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
4
Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
5
Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
a
m.serafi00@ccny.cuny.edu
e
hmakse@ccny.cuny.edu
Received:
25
January
2024
Accepted:
13
March
2024
Published online:
10
April
2024
The ongoing debate surrounding the impact of the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) social media campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has largely overshadowed the involvement of other actors. Our analysis brings to light a substantial group of suspended Twitter users, outnumbering the IRA user group by a factor of 60, who align with the ideologies of the IRA campaign. Our study demonstrates that this group of suspended Twitter accounts significantly influenced individuals categorized as undecided or weak supporters, potentially with the aim of swaying their opinions, as indicated by Granger causality.
Key words: Social network / Disinformation / Election / Russian trolls
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00464-3.
Matteo Serafino and Zhenkun Zhou contributed equally to this work.
© The Author(s) 2024
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