Replication materials for the paper Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
There is widespread concern that malicious foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian foreign influence accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among highly partisan Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign were eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.
This repository is organized as follows:
-
code (
./code/) contains scripts for data wrangling, aggregation and analysis. Script 30_write_up_results.R is the script for producing publication results and figures. -
data (
./data/) contains raw data for the analysis, which can be shared with privacy concerns in mind and falls under the 100MB GitHub limit. -
figures (
./figures/) is a directory for writing out figures for publication. -
figures_source (
./figures_source/) contains source file for figures in the main manuscript. -
logs (
./logs/) contains log files. -
renv (
./renv/) is a directory with renv dependency management files . -
results (
./results/) is a directory for writing out results from analysis and aggregated datasets for replication. -
supplementary (
./supplementary/) includes the code and compiled versions of supplementary information.
Log files are produced by running R CMD BATCH on scripts located in code folder from the root of the project directory. E.g.:
R CMD BATCH code/05_regression_analysis.R logs/05_regression_analysis.Rlog
R CMD BATCH code/30_write_up_results.R logs/30_write_up_results.Rlog
@Article{doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9,
author = {Eady, Gregory and Paskhalis, Tom and Zilinsky, Jan and Bonneau, Richard and Nagler, Jonathan and Tucker, Joshua A.},
title = "{Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior}",
journal = {Nature Communications},
year = {2023},
volume = {14},
number = {1},
pages = {62},
doi = {10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9},
}
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
