The Story behind Russian Twitter Trolls: How They Got Away with Looking Human – and How to Catch Them in the Future

Twitter's 2016 U.S. presidential election interference involved a known Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, using fake accounts and hashtags to propagate false news and influence the outcome. The accounts were mostly retweets of others, amplifying messages rather than posting original content. Three categories of accounts emerged: typical American citizens, local media outlets, and local political parties. Analyzing the data revealed an amplification network with three distinct communities and influential accounts. The Mueller indictment named two Twitter accounts specifically, @TEN_GOP and @March_For_Trump. To monitor and prevent future abuse, social media platforms and governments should use connections-first approaches to analyze datasets, using graph algorithms like PageRank to detect patterns of behavior.