Russian Information Operations May Have Caused Hate Crimes

• In Event: Understanding Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Understanding whether nation-state information operations on social media have real-world effects is an important question. Previous research has shown that Russia targeted American divisions along issues of race. We identify Islam as another issue on which Russian trolls posted inflammatory content and study the causal effect of their tweets about Islam on anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States. Three facts about Russian operation on Islam stand out: (1) they were continually posting about Islam since 2015; (2) their activity increased in 2017 after President Trump's Travel Ban (aka Muslim Ban) executive order issued on January 27, 2017. This is more evident when we look of the share of the Islam-related tweets from the total tweets posted by Russian trolls which shows a huge surge (up to 30% of all tweets) in 2017; and (3) their activity surged whenever there was a major Islamic terrorist attack in Europe.

Using Russian events, holidays and weather conditions in Saint Petersburg as an exogenous source of variation in production of content by Russian trolls, we find that increases in anti-Islam activity by Russian trolls led to increases in anti-Muslin hate crimes in the United States. In our preferred specification, a one standard deviation increase in log(Russian tweets about Islam) predicts a 0.03 increase in anti-Islam hate crimes for US divisions with average exposure to IRA trolls, a 30% increase from the sample mean. The result is robust to using a number of alternative instruments. This finding suggests that polarizing influence campaigns may have had very severe real-world consequences. At the same time, we remain cautious in interpreting these results given that placebo test results are mixed. There is no similar impact of Russian Islam-related tweets on other categories of hate crimes, with the exception of those directed towards Arab populations. We suspect that this could be the result of perpetrators conflating Arab and Muslim Americans.

Authors

• Meysam Alizadeh, University of Zurich

• Alicia R. Chen, Stanford University

• Jacob Norman Shapiro, Princeton University