Trolling for Terrorism: Searching for Signals and Noise in Internet Research Agency Messaging

Messaging by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) leveraged U.S. social media platforms, influence networks, and events to produce short- and long-term influence goals. During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, the IRA appears to have been aware of a terrorist attack before it occurred and sought to shape reactions. Data from a public archive of Twitter (X) posts attributed to the IRA show that, prior to the attack, the IRA increased the salience of their messaging connecting Muslims to terrorism and Democrats to weak records on terrorism and immigration from Muslim areas. To increase the reach of this operation, the IRA retweeted a set of accounts voicing these views, day after day, to increase the visibility of those accounts and shape the flow of messaging on the platform. The operation led to higher engagement with their tweets about terrorism after the attacks.