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This paper uses a combination of human coding and artificial intelligence to measure the similarity of Russian propaganda narratives with discussion of Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden in social and mainstream media in the United States. The research found the presence of the same five narratives across Russian English-language outlets, Fox News, rightwing websites, and leftwing Twitter. Four of the five narratives were present in rightwing Twitter. The research found a particularly strong convergence between the use of Biden attack narratives on Russian English-language sites such as RT and Sputnik with Fox News coverage. While this project did not identify specific Russian influence on key U.S. narratives about the Democratic candidate, it did find that Russian propaganda narratives generally differed only in quantity, rather than theme, from U.S. content. Across all these outlets, there was much discussion that Biden was corrupt, too old, a sexual deviant, and a placeholder for leftist conspiracy. All the sources aside from rightwing Twitter highlighted that Biden was also the frontrunner in the presidential race. This paper does not seek or find a 'smoking gun' that suggests specific planting of propaganda or disinformation from the Russians; rather, the analysis demonstrates in particular the similarity in narratives between Russian propaganda and right-leaning Fox News. This is worthy of discussion, in particular as Russia has traditionally been viewed as a threat to Western democracy and one might expect a greater difference in coverage between sources such as RT and Fox. At the same time, the five narratives also were present on leftwing Twitter, albeit in a different pattern. The analysis was carried out by the MarvelousAI StoryArc system, which measures news narratives by combining human coding, natural language processing, and machine learning.

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