Investigating the RATs: Russian Accounts on Twitter During the 2016 United States Presidential Election
Leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election, the Russian government infiltrated the United States with thousands of fake social media accounts with the intent of spreading misinformation and harming Senator Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. False information from Russian government-controlled media reached millions of American social media users between 2013 and 2017. TwitterTrails, a Web-based investigative tool created as a research project at the Socal Informatics Lab at Wellesley College, analyzes the origin and propagation of rumors from accounts on twitter. In this project, I investigate data on Russian Twitter accounts to create, analyze, and depict a visualization of account users and stories. The data used in this project is stored in file containing the screen name, user identification number, tweet count and story count or each Russian account. Lastly, the data for each account includes the identification numbers of all of the stories that the account interreacted with. Both the data and the visualization will be used in the final part of the project to draw conclusions pertaining to the use RATs leading up to and during the 2016 Presidential Election.
- Marisa Papagelis (marisapapagelis)
- This was a final project for my Data Structures course at Wellesley College (Spring 2020).
- A special thank you to Professor Metaxas & Professor Herbst.