Search

This study employs the full public Twitter information operations archive and its nearly 90,000 accounts from at least 22 actors to examine one particular element of the strategies employed by state-backed influence actors—strategic use of place claims. Academic research exploring state-affiliated social media influence operations has, to date, focused on one or a handful of campaigns. We argue this focus has the potential to miss tactics and strategies other nations' operations may be effectively using. Specifically, we examine account self-identified place claims to build an understanding of when and why these strategies are employed, and how these place claims relate to campaign targeting of specific populations. We examine where accounts claim to be located and how these claims relate to what we know about the targeting of each campaign. We also explore what other account behaviors are correlated with accounts' use of specific place claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015–2017 Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)'s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic "newsfeeds" made up a large, underanalyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1,000 tweets from the IRA newsfeeds and a matched set of real news sources from those same cities with up to five labels indicating the tweet represents a world in unrest and, if so, of what sort. We train a natural language classifier to extend these labels to 268 k IRA tweets and 1.13 million control tweets. Compared to the controls, tweets from the IRA were 34% more likely to represent unrest, especially crime and identity danger, and this difference jumped to about twice as likely in the months immediately before the election. Agenda setting by media is well-known and well-studied, but this weaponization by a coordinated information operation is novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document methods employed by Russia's Internet Research Agency to influence the political agenda of the United States from September 9, 2009 to June 21, 2018. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze Twitter accounts with known IRA affiliation to better understand the form and function of Russian efforts. We identified five handle categories: Right Troll, Left Troll, News Feed, Hashtag Gamer, and Fearmonger. Within each type, accounts were used consistently, but the behavior across types was different, both in terms of "normal" daily behavior and in how they responded to external events. In this sense, the Internet Research Agency's agenda-building effort was "industrial" – mass produced from a system of interchangeable parts, where each class of part fulfilled a specialized function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study models how a nation's military manpower system affects the decision to go to war. Manpower systems differ primarily in how they distribute costs: the volunteer system shares the war's manpower costs broadly, whereas the draft forces a subset of the population to bear a disproportionate share of the load. This difference affects an office- and policy-motivated politician's decision to go to war. The draft induces prowar policy-makers to pursue more wars than the volunteer military does, whereas the volunteer system induces antiwar policy-makers to pursue more wars than the draft does. The manpower systems cannot be generically ranked by efficiency because each makes errors the other avoids, but the volunteer system induces selection of more efficient wars for a large class of plausible preference distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]