Russian trolls speaking Russian: Regional Twitter operations and MH17

The role of social media in promoting media pluralism was initially viewed as wholly positive as social media could break the oligopoly of (often state-owned) mainstream media. However, some governments are allegedly manipulating social media by hiring online commentators (also known as trolls) to spread propaganda and disinformation. In particular, an alleged system of professional trolls operating both domestically and internationally exists in Russia. To improve transparency on trolls’ influence on social media, Twitter released in 2018 longitudinal data on accounts identified as Russian trolls and their tweets, starting a wave of quantitative research on Russian trolls. However, while foreign-targeted English language operations of these trolls have received significant attention, no research has analyzed their Russian language domestic and regional-targeted activities. This is despite the fact that half of the tweets in the Twitter-released data are in Russian. We address this gap by characterizing the Russian-language operations of Russian trolls using the Twitter data. We first take a broad view with a descriptive and temporal analysis, and then focus in on the trolls’ operation related to the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, one of the deadliest incidents in the conflict in Ukraine. Among other things, we find that Russian-language trolls have run 163 hashtag campaigns (where the use of a hashtag grows abruptly within one month). The main political sentiments of such campaigns are praising Russia and Putin (29%), criticizing Ukraine (26%), and criticizing the United States (US) along with Obama (9%). Further, we discovered that trolls actively reshared information. Namely, 76% of tweets were retweets or contained a URL. Particularly often trolls distributed the news of mainstream media. Additionally, we observe periodic temporal patterns of tweet arrival, with three distinct periods that change over time, suggesting that trolls use automation tools for posting. Further, we find that trolls’ information campaign on the MH17 crash was the largest in terms of tweet count. However, around 68% of tweets posted with MH17 hashtags were likely used simply for hashtag amplification. With these tweets excluded, about 49% of the tweets suggested to varying levels that Ukraine was responsible for the crash, and only 13% contained disinformation and propaganda presented as news. Interestingly, trolls promoted inconsistent alternative theories for the incident. Namely, half of the false news tweets suggested that Ukraine downed the plane with an air-to-air missile, whereas 23% promoted the ground-to-air missile version.