Russian Holidays Predict Troll Activity 2015-2017

Abstract

While international election interference is not new, Russia is credited with "industrializing" trolling on English-language social media platforms. In October 2018, Twitter retrospectively identified 2.9 million English-language tweets as covertly written by trolls from Russia's Internet Research Agency. Most active 2015-2017, these Russian trolls generally supported the Trump campaign (Senate Intelligence Committee, 2019) and researchers have traced how this content disseminated across Twitter. Here, we take a different tack and seek exogenous drivers of Russian troll activity. We find that trolling fell 35% on Russian holidays and to a lesser extent, when temperatures were cold in St. Petersburg. More recent trolls released by Twitter do not show any systematic relationship to holidays and temperature, although substantially fewer of these that have been made public to date. Our finding for the pre-2018 interference period may furnish a natural experiment for evaluating the causal effect of Russian trolling on indirectlyaffected outcomes and political behaviorsoutcomes that are less traceable to troll content and potentially more important to policymakers than the direct dissemination activities previously studied. As a case in point, we describe suggestive evidence that Russian holidays impacted daily trading prices in 2016 election betting markets.

Leaders or Followers? A Temporal Analysis of Tweets from IRA Trolls

“…Equipped with the techniques and insights offered here, we call for further IRA-focused research in a similar vein. We suggest that research examine the role of exogenous predictors of IRA-based Twitter activity, such as whether fewer word spikes led by the IRA co-occur with Russian holidays or cold weather in St. Petersburg (Almond, Du, and Vogel 2020). However, we also encourage future research to consider the presence of second-order (or third-order, etc.)…”