Yesterday, I was a footnote in history!

Yesterday, I received exciting news! A piece that I had written with Chris Wells for Columbia Journalism Review was cited in the Mueller Report, which was released a day ago.

The piece that we wrote for CJR focused on news organizations that embedded tweets by Internet Research Agency (IRA) handles into their news stories. We’ve increased the number of outlets analyzed since the CJR piece (it was about 40 when we started, but over 100 now), and our finding still holds: a majority of news organizations cited an IRA account in at least one story.

Contrary to popular opinion, these IRA accounts were not sharing “fake news” (as in: false information). Instead, IRA tweets were often quoted for their salient, often hyper-partisan opinions. For example, one tweet advocated for a Heterosexual Pride Day as a way of inciting LGBTQ activists. Another called refugees, “rapefugees”. These accounts would often portray themselves as American people (e.g., @JennAbrams portrayed herself as a “typical” American girl, as shown by research done by my colleague Yiping Xia), or as groups (like @ten_gop, an IRA account pretending to be Tennessee GOP members, and @blacktivist, an IRA account pretending to be BlackLivesMatter organizers).

This has important implications, and speaks to Muller’s earlier indictment of the IRA, which noted that Russia’s campaign goal was “spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general” (p. 6). Ironically, the discovery of the IRA campaign in the summer/fall of 2017 probably fed into this distrust (especially since news organization were as likely to be “duped” as American citizens).

The (underacted) part where we are referenced focuses on this specific issue—journalists embedded these tweets thinking they reflected the opinions of U.S. citizens. This is incredibly problematic, and something that both academics and journalists want to find solutions for. Following our publication in early of 2018, several news organizations reached out to us regarding the specific articles i which they had unintentionally quoted IRA tweets. The research team was particularly excited by these exchanges because it shows that journalists care, and want to avoid doing this in the future.

New UW Study on Russian Twitter Trolls in U.S. Media

This past week, my research team published a study on news media's use of tweets written by Russia's Internet Research Agency (a copy of the study can be found here).

We also wrote a parallel article with Columbia Journalism Review.

Importantly, we show that Russian tweets conveying stereotypical partisan beliefs were picked up by a variety of mainstream and partisan news outlets. We are particularly critical of news stories that use "strings of tweet" to represent the vox populi (voice of the people). Unlike the more traditional "man on the street" interviews, tweets used in news stories (particularly online ones) are difficult to verify.

However, as shown by the (admittedly shallow) penetration of IRA tweets, it is still important for journalists to verify these Twitter users to the best of their ability. Journalists can do so by corresponding outside of the tweet-o-sphere (e.g., email), trying to look up the user's name on a search engine, or by looking at that user's past social media history.

Digital, partisan news outlets were particularly susceptible to embedded these IRA tweets. Liberal and conservative organizations both used tweets to convey cheap talk (discourse that supports their position or criticizes their opponents'). If the goal of Russian disinformation in the United States was to increase doubt in the news media system and increase polarization in the civil sphere, the amplification of these messages through partisan outlets represent some measure of success.

 

Why does this matter? Aside from natural concerns about deceptive foreign practices to our public sphere, the appearance of these messages across a broad range of news organizations  (bost partisan and traditional, liberal and conservative) shows how little tweets were checked. It highlights a greater problem: our willingness to promote partisan messages to prove a political point, even if they have little to no journalistic value and are not verified.