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Russia’s Twitter Influence Campaign Was Unusually Pro-Gun: Report

Trolls typically tried to stoke fury on both sides of the aisle, but not when it came to guns.

Russia’s Twitter influence campaign attempted to breed fury on both sides of the aisle by playing to liberal and conservative extremes on controversial issues—but when it came to guns, the accounts leaned strongly to the right, according to a Friday analysis from NPR. NPR analyzed millions of Twitter posts from the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, most of which occurred between 2015 and 2017, and found that 77 percent of the posts from those accounts, many of which directly echoed the language of the NRA’s tweets, were pro-NRA and pro-gun. NPR added that the pro-NRA posts had approximately five times more impressions than anti-NRA posts. "It’s 100 percent an anomaly,” said one of the Clemson researchers who provided the tweets to NPR and has studied the troll farm extensively. “The gun debate has all the hallmarks of a typical tool in their tool set—but they only use half of it.”