Tracking the Propagation of Russian Content on the Web in the 2020 Primaries

• In Event: Monitoring Digital Disinformation: Innovative Methods and Empirical Results

Abstract

This paper offers new methodologies and metrics to study foreign influence through content dissemination. While most of the studies focus on the cartography of social networks —mostly Twitter and Facebook—, we propose to monitor another major source of information by tracking the propagation of Russian-sourced news throughout the Web. Our study focuses on the United States 2020 Democratic primaries.
We chose to monitor content produced by 3 different sources: Russia Today (RT), Sputnik and Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH). Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik News constitute the heart of the Russian media apparatus, broadcasting in many languages. They depend mostly on public funding and are run by the same key figure, Margarita Simonyan. Russia Beyond the Headlines and Sputnik News belong to Rossiya Segodnya, an official Russian news holding, and publishes news, commentaries, opinions on culture, politics, lifestyle, business and science. RT however belongs to a non-profit organization called TV Novosti, which received 22 billions of roubles of public subventions in 2018.
Our previous studies have demonstrated the wide dissemination of content produced by Russian agencies in French language throughout the Web and particularly Western Africa , in Arabic Language with a focus on North Africa and even in Turkish language. These contents are increasingly popular in various parts of the world where they are appropriated by local news agencies, political groups or associations that republish them on their websites because they resonate with their own ideas or serve their agenda.
We chose to focus on these media in English language to assess the dissemination of their production in the context of the Democratic primaries. We selected over 6,000 articles from these Russian media mostly published between March 2018 and August 2019. Using our tracking tools, we identified nearly 87,000 re-publications of these articles across the Web, with over 900 websites republishing at least 10 articles. We developed other innovative methodologies to assess the links between these websites, detect communities and build a spatialized graph representing our results. This study highlights the galaxy of politically diverse website communities receptive to Russian narratives and likely to amplify them in the during the 2020 presidential election.

Authors

• Frederick Douzet, University Paris 8

• Kevin Limonier, University of Paris 8

• Bruce E. Cain, Stanford University

• Kave Salamatian, University of Savoie