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Kremlin's Twitter: Russian Tweets on the US and French Elections

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Kremlin's Twitter: Russian Tweets on the US and French Elections Kremlin’s Twitter: Russian Tweets on the US and French elections. Alla Baranovsky April 1, 2018 Abstract The possibility of Russian meddling in the American elections in 2016 has made headlines around the world. As a result, the French election of 2017 was being watched with much trepidation for signs of a similar occurrence. But how do Rus- sian users of social media feel about the two elections? I address this question using a newly collected database of Russian tweets about the two elections. As the Rus- sian authorities have made no secret of their own increased reliance on social media platforms like Twitter for propaganda,1 I also gauge the presence of the pro- govern- mental narrative about both elections on Twitter. For instance, a strong predictor of favorable sentiment for Kremlin-approved candidates is the number of re-tweets for a status (indication that it is being mass distributed), as well as it originating with Russia Today, a Kremlin supported news source. This indicates that Twitter, once an online space for the Western oriented, young opposition, is becoming appropriated by the regime’s propaganda machine, to accomplish both domestic and international goals. Introduction In March of 2017, a former FBI agent Clint Watts described his understanding of how Russian-created Twitter bots masquerading as Midwestern Republican voters spread fake news on the social media platform, promoted the name of Donald Trump and denigrated 1Ivan Sekretarev, “Kremlin’s ’Patriotic Education’ to Target Russian Kids Online," The Moscow Times, 30 April, 2017. Found at https://themoscowtimes.com/ news/kremlins-patriotic-education-targets-russias- schoolkids-online-57578. Last accessed 8 May, 2017. 1 his opponent, Hillary Clinton.2 Russian bots that pretended to be American voters, like the infamous “Jenna Abrams" account3, were not the extent of the Russian informational campaign during the US election. Russian bots and employees of the Internet Research Agency also propagated a large number of messages about the US election in Russian, on the Russian subsection of Twitter. The attempts of the Russian government to influence the outcome of the US election is an example of a sovereign state engaging in a propaganda campaign that is designed specifically to meddle in other countries’ domestic political affairs. Although in some cases there might be a direct, observable, benefit to the offending state’s actions, in many cases this benefit is unclear or obscured. That is, specifically to the Russian case, the attempt to elect a sympathetic president, who might be amenable to removing sanctions, has a clear and observable payoff, but the same country’s attempts to foment secessionist sentiment in the US is less easily explainable. Whatever the reason for engaging in informational attacks, the state that does it in the twenty-first century certainly has more channels and mechanisms for a successful campaign than before. Technological progress in general, and the rise of social media in particular, have changed the methods used by offending countries. Whereas in the USSR, the ideological precursor to Putin’s Russia, the main vehicle of propaganda was the news- paper, and later the TV, Putin’s public opinion army increasingly relies on media such as Twitter and Facebook. Kremlin’s “troll farms" (the Russian counterpart to the Chinese “50 cent army") reportedly pay hundreds of employees to create and promote hashtags, 2O’Connor, Gabe, “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During the 2016 Election," NPR, 3 April, 2017. Found at https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522503844/how- russian-twitter-bots-pumped-out-fake-news-during-the-2016-election. Last accessed 27 March, 2018. 3O’Sullivan, Donie, “The Kremlin-linked troll Twitter can’t seem to shake," CNN, 29 November, 2017. Found at http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/28/media/jenna-abrams-russia-twitter-back- again/index.html?iid=EL. Last accessed 27 March, 2018. 2 among other things.4According to anecdotal evidence provided by journalists’ investi- gations, employees in such organizations spend their work days engaged in “trolling" – aggressive stalking and/or harrassing users of the social medium who are expressing an ideological opinion divergent from that of the Kremlin.5 Moreoever, some states, like Russia and China, already have sophisticated domestic propaganda resources that allow for an easy transfer of know-how to influencing public opinion abroad. Hybrid political regimes, like Russia and China, pay exceptionally close attention to domestic public opinion because stability of the incumbent, especially in moments of crisis, depends on elite calculations which, in turn, depend on public opinion. For instance, if a weakening authoritarian incumbent is caught in a corruption scandal, this might provoke large scale protests, as was the case in Russia in 2011 - 2013. Such a wave of open dissent causes elites to recalculate their chances of survival in power with the current incumbent, triggering a mechanism similar to a bank run. In some cases, this dynamic might result in the removal of the incumbent. This is why such regimes have for decades developed and maintained sophisticated mechanisms of manipulating the opinions of their citizens.6 In this study, I explore how Russian users of Twitter, previously composed almost exclusively of Western-oriented, urban, educated elites, but now also inclusive of Kremlin propagandists, talk about the US and the French elections of 2016 and 2017, respectively. This paper proceeds as follows. After reviewing existing theory on social media in politics in general, and in Russia in particular, I provide some qualitative evidence for Kremlin’s 4Andrei Zakharov, Polina Rusyaeva, “Rassledovanie RBK: kak iz ’fabriki trollei’ vyrasla ’fabrika me- dia,"RBK, 24 March, 2017. Found at http://www.rbc.ru/ magazine/2017/04/58d106b09a794710fa8934ac? from=subject 5A famous investigation that started further inquiry into Kremlin’s “troll farms" is Adrian Chen, “The Agency," The New York Times 2 June, 2015. Last accessed 8 May, 2017. 6Henry Hale, “Eurasian Polities as Hybrid Regimes: The Case of Putin’s Russia," Journal of Eurasian Studies 1:1, 2010, pp. 33 - 41. 3 official position on presidential candidates. In the next section, I examine a database of tweets obtained via Twitter’s API, using select hashtags, in the days leading up to, during, and after the two elections. I look at frequencies of words to find the dominant narrative and the most talked about candidates. I find that during the US election, Donald Trump is talked about considerably more than Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Marine Le Pen is the most frequently mentioned candidate around the time of the French election. I also do a simple evaluation of sentiment by coding tweets as Kremlin-friendly (compatible with Kremlin-promoted narrative), Kremlin-unfriendly, or neutral/unclear. I find that the first category dominates during both of the elections. Finally, I examine the determinants of support for Kremlin-promoted candidates, and find that the number of retweets for the status, as well as its origins at Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded news source, are strong predictors. The final section concludes. In this paper, I do not consider another type of meddling in another nation’s political outcomes, which is arguably a more direct way to interfere in elections, that Russia has been accused of. Cyber meddling, hacking and leaking emails and other files, are out- side of the scope of this paper. Both the Clinton and the Macron campaigns, those of candidates antagonistic to the Kremlin-preferred scenario, have reported digital break-ins with evidence pointing to Russian hackers. Although I do not address this aspect of elec- tion meddling further, it informs the general context of Russia’s attempts at influencing a political outcome abroad. Why is it important to examine the Russian language tweets, since they are not in- tended for the actual population of the US voters? This is because examining Russia- originated tweets in English requires knowledge of which Twitter accounts are registered to Russian users. In the absence of such information, the Russian Twittersphere approx- imates the sentiment that the country’s propaganda machine would want to disseminate 4 abroad. The presumed intended mechanism of the process that I am focusing on in this paper, the dissemination of a Kremlin-promoted narrative on Twitter, is as follows. Kremlin dis- tributes a Russian-language message on Twitter and other social media as part of a broader campaign, in more than one language, in the hopes that the topic will be "picked up" for discussion and make it to low-quality foreign news media, like Alex Jones’s Infowars in the United States. The message, then, has the potential to reach higher level conversations among policy makers. Not to be disregarded, also, are voters of US-Russian and French- Russian heritage. Many of these citizens of the US and France still follow Russian media online and elsewhere, and engage in regular conversations with their families in Russia. Their votes could be of some importance to the eventual outcome of the elections. Background Since the Arab spring, political scientists have been increasingly evaluating the effect that the Internet, especially social media, can have on beliefs and political behavior. Al- though a consensus on the effect of social media on political outcomes is still lacking, there is considerable evidence that social media might catalyze political action, such as protests. Benford and Snow (2000) find that social media might provide “frames" for a protest movement that would help propel this movement from small - scale to large - scale.7 Social media (and the Internet, more generally) have also been found to exacerbate social cleavages and worsen political polarization, due to a process termed “homophilous sorting." In other words, when people have relative control over information they are ex- posed to (for instance, seeing ideologically congruent news and posts on social media, 7Robert Benford and David Snow, “Framing processes and social movements: an overview and an assessment".
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