Strategic Deception
Journal: Digital Culture & Society
Year: 2024

A growing body of research on state-sponsored social media actors has raised concerns over attempts by hostile states to influence public opinion online. The annexation of Crimea is one such high-profile cases, in which Russia was accused of using media technologies to influence Western publics. I use Twitter’s/X’s and Clemson University’s Anglophone data on Internet Research Agency (IRA) and GRU (Russian military intelligence agency) actors and compare it with other users’ (“non-troll”) tweets