RAND report warns of likely Russian attempts to sow discord in U.S. presidential election by social media

Election interference has sounded many alarms this year, all the way to the White House and the halls of Congress. Now, the Rand Corporation is warning that a coordinated effort on Twitter to influence and provoke chaos during the upcoming presidential election is underway.

“Social media has made it cheaper and easier for foreign actors to mount increasingly sophisticated attacks on our democracy and our political discourse,” said William Marcellino, lead author of “Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election: Tools for Detecting Online Election Interference,” and a social and behavioral scientist at RAND. “Many Americans are immersed in online conversations that have been shaped artificially, and that are giving them a false and distorted picture of the world.”

For its new report, RAND software tools analyzed 2.2 million tweets from 630,391 Twitter accounts collected between January 1 and May 6, 2020. Troll and super-connector accounts — meaning highly-networked accounts — were found to cluster among certain Twitter communities and steer the conversation around the election. The largest share of both went to pro-Donald Trump communities, though no side was safe.

Trolls tended to be strongly supportive of President Donald Trump and QAnon content, as well as other content favoring the incumbent, but anti-Vice President Joe Biden, and commonly either criticized him or praised his one-time rival, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. According to the report, the result was an orchestrated attack that may have favored Trump and harmed Biden.

It is an effort that researchers note is consistent with Russian attempts to meddle in past elections. It also builds on the conclusions of a prior RAND report, which determined that foreign interference’s main goal is to paralyze the American political process and promote extremes, rendering consensus improbable. It’s a longstanding strategy common to Russia, and one that tends to further its interests.

“New technologies may have made it easier for foreign actors to carry out malign influence efforts, but technological innovation can also help us combat them,” Marcellino said. “We’ve detected interference in prior elections, but we’ve been closing the barn door too late—after an election. Our study shows that it is possible to detect and respond to these efforts before an election.”

As a result, RAND has recommended that social media platforms adapt and embrace new election interference detection methods and publicize the threat of online interference to guarantee awareness.