Russia's influence campaign on Twitter pushed pro-gun and pro-National Rifle Association messages during the 2016 election and beyond — a rare example of consistency in a scheme that mostly sought to play up extremes on the left and right.
On every issue, from race to health care, women's rights to police brutality, gay marriage to global warming, accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency[1] sought to amplify controversy by playing up conflict.
Except when it came to guns and the NRA.
That's according to a new analysis of millions of now-deleted Twitter posts connected to the group, done by NPR in collaboration with an outside data firm.
Last year, Twitter notified the House intelligence committee about thousands of accounts[2] it linked to the Internet Research Agency; the social media company has deleted millions of tweets associated with those accounts.
But Clemson University associate professors Darren Linvill[3] and Patrick Warren[4] realized that one of Clemson's research labs had inadvertently archived the tweets. This saved a record of Russian influence operations online from 2012 to 2018, with most of the tweets occurring from 2015 to 2017.
They provided NPR with a list of posts made by the Internet Research Agency that related to guns and the National Rifle Association. That data was then analyzed to assess the Russian troll farm's messaging and its influence.
Download the supporting materials here[5].
The NRA declined to comment for this story.
The scale
Of the accounts that talked about guns, 60 percent were pro-NRA and pro-gun, while only 15 percent were opposed. And of the content the Internet Research Agency produced that mentioned firearms, guns, the Second Amendment or the NRA,
