In the wake of two recent reports on Kremlin disinformation campaigns and their impact on US politics, the narrative that the Internet Research Agency produced "commercial clickbait"rather than propaganda has emerged with renewed vigor. Let's test this.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
Here's the dictionary definition of "clickbait". We categorized the English-language original tweets (i.e., retweets are excluded) from the Internet Research Agency dataset released by Twitter into "clickbait" and several other categories.
Not all tweets containing links qualify as clickbait. Examples of things that do not:
- major news sites
- fringe/conspiracy news sites
- opinion columns
- wikipedia entries
- major news sites
- fringe/conspiracy news sites
- opinion columns
- wikipedia entries
Things that are categorized as clickbait in this analysis:
- sites hawking dubious weight-loss products
- "7 things your mortgage lender HATES!"-style articles
- sites hawking dubious weight-loss products
- "7 things your mortgage lender HATES!"-style articles
We classified the 300 sites most frequently linked by the banned Internet Research Agency accounts as shown below. The "clickbait" category only makes up 4% of the total tweet volume, which pretty solidly debunks "commercial clickbait" as a description of the IRA's activities.
For the sake of comparison, here's a thread describing a network of accounts that actually *do* propagate clickbait.
