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The Mueller report discusses the social media disinformation aspect of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. We took a look at 12 of the hashtags mentioned over the year prior to the election, as well as a control group of 8 over the same timespan.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
First observation - a sizable share (20% or more) of the traffic for 7 of the 12 hashtags mentioned in the report came from accounts that followed one of six banned IRA accounts we have follower lists for. The same is true for only one hashtag in the control group, #CruzCrew.
(previous thread discussing followers of banned trolls here)
What media websites are linked in the traffic containing each hashtag? A rather wide variety; notably, @wikileaks shows up prominently for four of the twelve hashtags mentioned in the Mueller report, in contrast to none of the controls.
We used Vader sentiment analysis to score the tweets containing each hashtag. The control group showed positive average scores for each hashtag, four of the twelve from the Mueller report had negative average scores: #gop, #hillaryemail, #hillarysemail, #VoterFraud.
