Russia’s Viral Use of RT to Shape Global Discourse on Syria

• In Event: How States Spread and Citizens Respond to Misinformation under Authoritarianism

Abstract

Governments around the globe are increasingly using social media platforms to spread state-sponsored news abroad. One of the most notorious examples of this phenomenon is the Russian government’s use of RT (formerly Russia Today) in the online sphere. Here we evaluate when, how, and to what degree RT is shaping global political narratives. We focus on Russia’s use of RT on Twitter during the months surrounding the Russian military intervention in Syria in September 2015. Using a dataset of over 21.8 million English and 11.3 million Arabic tweets collected between August 2015 and November 2015, we find that RT was remarkably successful on Twitter. First, RT was the most shared news source about Syria, outperforming well-respected Western outlets like the New York Times and the BBC in the English language data, and strong regional players like the Saudi Al-Arabiya network and the Qatari Al-Jazeera Arabic network in the Arabic language data. In addition, RT’s content successfully advanced narratives that provided favorable coverage of the Russian intervention and undermined Western involvement in Syria. Surprisingly, we find no evidence to suggest that RT’s success was driven by bots or trolls. Instead, it appears that RT employed a more effective social media strategy than other outlets, using more salient hashtags and producing a larger volume of tweets to amplify its reach.

Authors

• Megan MacDuffee Metzger, Stanford University

• Alexandra Arons Siegel, University of Coloardo Boulder