(e.g.,

Analyses of these Twitter datasets also demonstrate a range of tactics the IRA
employed to inﬂuence Americans and other targets. A study by Yin et al. (2018)
showed that IRA accounts shared signiﬁcantly more junk news, particularly
around the 2016 election, than other users but still only accounted for 6 percent
of all links. These accounts also shared local news ﬁfteen times more often than
politically interested users and ninety times more than average users in an
attempt to take advantage of trust in local news sources. These accounts
frequently impersonated American partisans (Yin et al. 2018) but only shared
disinformation around 20 percent of the time, spending the rest of the time
mimicking interests and values of the social identity being spoofed (Dawson and

3 Dawson and Innes are unique in analyzing IRA propaganda efforts in Europe as opposed to the

United States.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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Social_Media_and_Democracy