In 2018, the popular social media platform Reddit announced that they had discovered 944 accounts they suspected to be linked to the Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). This project explores their posts to determine the Russian foreign influence agenda and the broad question - "What were these accounts up to on Reddit?"
The first question was simple: how long had these accounts been active on Reddit? The answer lies in the plot below - each line represents an account and the karma (cumulative score of all the posts) the accounts gathered over time. Here we can see that a flurry of accounts were active in the fourth quarter of 2015, but all accounts were abandoned by the end of the year - perhaps in favor of a new strategy. The next wave of accounts came in the middle of 2016 - during the presidential election - and stayed active throughout 2017. Some accounts continuously posted viral posts to gain karma before tapering off.
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Where were these accounts posting? |
I found that these accounts posted to hundreds of subreddits, but I was able to group many of the subreddits into themes. Below is a plot showing the number of posts to each given subreddit where the bars are colored by the grouping that subreddit falls into.
How did their posts to the different groups change over time?
I then took a deeper dive into the total number of posts the IRA made for the various groupings. The accounts started out with cute posts to subreddits pertaining to animals with some funny/political content. Before the 2016 election, they cut the animal content and upped their posting to political, military/police, black issue, and regional subreddits. (Regional subreddits are defined as subreddits for cities, states, and countries. Examples include r/cincinatti, r/texas, r/canada, and r/chicago.) Finally, after the 2016 election, the Russians went all in on posts to Bitcoin and technology-related subreddits.
From the first and third figures above, we can see there was a "beginning" wave of posters in 2015 flooding animal subreddits then a "middle" wave of posters in 2016 posting to political and military/police subreddits and finally a "end" wave of posters in late 2017 posting to technology and bitcoin-related subreddits.
The Beginning (Pre 2016)
As seen earlier, there was an original batch of IRA-linked Reddit accounts that were made in 2015 and then abandoned by 2016. This was also when we saw a rise in the "animal" subreddit category from these users. Below we can see which users were posting then and to which categories. If we filter by users topping the animals category, we can see even the users posting to animal subreddits were active in political ones (to a lesser extent). Perhaps they were trying to get their foothold in the Reddit platform and posting "innocent" content as to not raise the attention of people who would view them as Russian trolls.
The greatest offender of the animal posts was u/Deusexmachina112. Looking at the posts from this user by subreddit (below), we can see that all of her posts were made in 2015 (hover to see titles and dates of each post). While the animal posts seem innocuous, this user is beginning to plant seeds of doubt in American politics and institutions by posting to a few news subreddits titles such as "Things are bad and getting worse for Jeb Bush" and "Student's violent arrest caught on video; officer under investigation."
The Middle (2016- mid 2017)
How did users' posts change across the groups?
How do things change when we move into 2016 through the middle of 2017?
- Posts to political subreddits really ramp up in this timeframe.
- Users posting in the Black interest groups also frequently posted in Military/Police and Political.
- However, what I found most interesting was done by looking at the user who posted the most to the regional subreddits - u/Kevin_Milner. Did he intensely post to one regional-specific subreddit like r/pennsylvania? Was he pretending to be from a specific town as part of his persona?
Where in the world does Kevin Milner even live?
In the figure above, we see that u/Kevin_Milner is the top poster to regional subreddits of all his IRA contemporaries. Was he assigned to infiltrate a specific region? The plot below shows which subreddits he posted to (and how many posts he has in each). If you hover over the bars, it will tell you when the posts were made and their titles. Interesting, Mr. Milner posts to r/Georgia, r/Atlanta, r/Charlotte_NC, r/Minneapolis, r/Indiana, r/Newark, r/Nevada, r/newjersey, r/SanDiego, r/minnesota, r/mississippi, r/Ohio, and r/nyc. Generally users post to regional subreddits where they reside, so I found this behavior suspicious. By hovering over the bars, I found that almost all posts in these subreddits were about police brutality or acts of terror just before the 2016 election. Mr. Milner's goal appears to have been to sow discord in subreddits that make fun of the police but also giving regional communities something to fear.
The End (mid 2017-2018)
Let's repeat our visual of authors' posts to subreddit groupings but filter it to posts made between July 1, 2017 and throughout 2018 (until the accounts were suspended by Reddit). Below we can find the following:
- Political posts were dying down, and no posts were made in the black-interest, religion, and military/police subreddits.
- One rogue user, u/baconlover8 made 6 posts to LGBT subreddits and no other types of subreddits.
- Bitcoin (and Tech) dominated the posts in this time period.
Why the interest in Bitcoin?
After the 2016 election, we saw the increase in posts to Bitcoin-related subreddits. To dig deeper, I created the below visual which plots the change in daily closing value of Bitcoin over time and sizes the points by the number of posts the IRA made to Bitcoin-related subreddits on that day. We can see posts increasing as the currency gained value in late 2017; however, by mid January, as the value of the coin was plummeting, so was their interest.
If we remove the time component and focus on the relationship between the number of posts and the daily closing value of bitcoin, the below plot can be produced showing how the number of posts varied by the closing value of Bitcoin on days when the posts were made.
Additionally, if we look at the daily gains in the bitcoin value (closing price - opening price), we can see the visual below.
The plots show that the IRA posts somewhat indiscriminately with regards to the value of Bitcoin; no clear relationship emerges. We'll never know if the IRA had more planned for their Bitcoin presence due to their accounts all being suspended during this final campaign.
Sources
Header Image: https://www.stopfake.org/en/tag/internet-research-agency/
Reddit Dataset: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/suspiciousaccounts Reddit's 2017 Transparency Report: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8bb85p/reddits_2017_transparency_report_and_suspect/ Bitcoin Dataset: https://www.cryptodatadownload.com/data/northamerican/ praw: https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ |