Professor Philip Howard
Professor of Internet Studies
Philip N. Howard is a professor of sociology, information, and international affairs. He is Director of the Programme on Democracy and Technology, and is a Professorial Fellow of Balliol College.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters. This report provides the first major analysis of this attack based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
The report answers several key questions about the activities of the known IRA accounts. In this analysis, we investigate how the IRA exploited the tools and platforms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact US users. In laying out the sheer extent of the IRA’s activities, it identifies which aspects of the IRA’s campaign strategy got the most traction on social media and the means of microtargeting US voters with particular messages.
Details
Publication date:
December 2018
December 2018
Authors
Dr Dimitra (Mimie) Liotsiou
Former Researcher
Mimie was a postdoctoral researcher on the Computational Propaganda project. Her research interests include social influence, causal inference, computational social science, and data science, particularly using real-world data of online interactions.
John Kelly
Graphika
Camille François
Graphika