New study from UT shows Russian propaganda may have actually helped Trump win

Monica Kast
Knoxville

Russian propaganda in the 2016 election may have helped change some Americans' minds and convince them to vote for Donald Trump, a new study from researchers at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville found. 

The study looked at the Twitter activity of Russian social media bots leading up to the 2016 election, compared to the popularity of Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. 

The research does not prove that Russian propaganda definitively affected the outcome of the election. However, in weeks when Russian bots got more likes and retweets on Twitter, "that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls," Damian Ruck wrote in an article explaining the study. 

Ruck is one of the authors of the study, and a post-doctoral researcher at UT-Knoxville. Ruck was not available for comment for this article. 

President Donald J. Trump at a rally for Marsha Blackburn on October 1, 2018 in Johnson City.

The study also found that Russian Twitter activity "was a better predictor of Donald Trump's polling numbers that his own Twitter activity." However, Clinton's popularity was not affected by the Twitter bots' activity. 

The study found that for approximately every 25,000 re-tweets from Twitter accounts connected with the Russian Internet Research Agency, there was a 1% increase in opinion polls for Trump — although the study also notes the tweets were part of "a larger disinformation campaign" and were unlikely to have shifted public opinion that much on their own. The Internet Research Agency was key to spreading Russian propaganda during the election and used thousands of bots to create English language tweets. 

Particularly, undecided voters were likely to be swayed by the Twitter activity, Ruck wrote.

"Thirteen percent of voters didn't make their final choice until the last week before the election," Ruck wrote. "This last week happened to be a time when Russian Twitter trolls were at their most prolific, publishing many tweets disproportionately laden with emotional words eliciting anger and fear. Post-election analysis by CNN shows the majority of the undecided 13% voted for Donald Trump."

Several other researchers from UT were part of the study as well: Natalie Rice is a research associate at the Center for Information and Communication Studies at UT-Knoxville, Joshua Borycz is a graduate assistant in information science at UT and Alex Bentley is the department head of anthropology at UT-Knoxville. 

The study says propaganda is a growing problem for all political parties. 

"Here we have presented evidence that social media disinformation can measurably change public opinion polls," the authors wrote in the study. "Though we focused on a particular high-profile example in 2016, social media propaganda is a growing problem affecting voting populations around the world, regardless of affiliation, and ought to be given serious attention in the future."