IRA Propaganda on Twitter:Stoking Antagonism and Tweeting Local News

This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg. We relied on a historical database of tweets to retrieve 4,539 tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts between 2012 and 2017 and coded 2,501 tweets manually. The messages cover newsworthy events in the United States, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Tweets were annotated using 19 control variables to investigate whether IRA operations on social media are consistent with classic propaganda models. The results show that the IRA operates a composite of user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, with the lion's share of their work focusing on US daily news activity and the diffusion of polarized news across different national contexts.