Fronts & Friends: An Investigation into Two Twitter Networks Linked to Russian Actors
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- On February 23, 2021 Twitter announced the removal of two networks linked to Russian actors, which it had shared with the Stanford Internet Observatory on February 12. The first network, which we will call Network 1, “can be reliably tied to Russian state actors,” according to Twitter. It consisted of two types of accounts: accounts that claimed to be located in Syria and accounts that spread anti-NATO messaging. Many of these accounts were sockpuppets, claiming to be individuals that did not exist, or fake media fronts. The network includes 26,762 tweets that date back to the end of 2013. The most recent tweets were from the end of 2020. The largest account had 20,505 followers, but the rest had far fewer. Accounts tweeted in English, Russian, and Arabic. Many accounts were nominally multilingual. A handful of the fake accounts in this set have already been noted in a September 2020 Graphika report into a Facebook takedown of accounts attributed to the Russian military. The second network, which we will call Network 2, consisted of 31 accounts created between July 2009 and October 2020. While we are using the term “Network 2” to differentiate the data set, it appears to consist of scattered collections of accounts tied to previously-unearthed operations on other social media platforms, including Facebook. According to Twitter, this network shows “signs of being affiliated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian government-linked actors.” This network produced 68,914 tweets and tweeted in English, Russian, Turkish, and French – several accounts tweeted in multiple languages. Subjects included international affairs of interest to the Russian government, and a cluster with a specific focus on Turkey and disputing the Armenian genocide. The largest account had 11,542 followers but only 8 had over 1,000 followers, and 11 had under ten. The accounts in aggregate had only 79,807 engagements across the entire tweet corpus, and appear to have been linked to the operations primarily via technical indicators rather than amplification or conversation between them. A few of the bios from accounts in the set claim to be journalists. Two profiles, belonging to an American activist and a Russian academic, were definitively real people; we do not have sufficient visibility into the technical indicators that led to their inclusion in the network and thus do not include them in our discussion. However, several of the accounts in Network 2 were tied to quasi-think tank media properties – a favored legitimization tactic leveraged by multiple information operations actors within the Russian intelligence services and additionally by mercenary social media operators linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin (such as the Internet Research Agency). We discuss those accounts, and how this tactic has been repeatedly leveraged by multiple entities within the Russian intelligence services and adjacent actors, in this report.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | March 29, 2022; December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | January 5, 2022; February 23, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | DiResta, Renée | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Grossman, Shelby |
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4941-7969
(unverified)
|
Subjects
| Subject | Twitter, takedown, Russia |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Report |
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- DiResta, R. and Grossman, S. (2021). Fronts & Friends: An Investigation into Two Twitter Networks Linked to Russian Actors. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/jv674ss6714
Collection
Stanford Internet Observatory, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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