Foreign Influence Campaigns

Deceptive online networks are coordinated efforts that use identity deception to pursue strategic political or financial goals. During the US 2020 elections, these networks reached at least 37 million Facebook and 3 million Instagram users, representing 15% and 2% of the platforms’ active US adult users, respectively. Only 3 networks out of 49—1 network with explicitly political aims and 2 that appeared to use politics as a lure for profit—were responsible for over 70% of users reached. Notably, accounts unaffiliated with the networks played an important role in facilitating this reach by resharing content the three networks produced. Deceptive networks, regardless of whether their goals were political or financial, reached users who were older, more conservative, more frequently exposed to content from untrustworthy sources, and spent more time on Facebook.

How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narratives, rather than the same broad themes or exact features. We propose a novel approach to measure this quantity of interest, which we call “narrative similarity,” by using large language models to distill texts to their core ideas and then compare the similarity of claims rather than of words, phrases, or sentences. The result is an estimand much closer to narrative similarity than what is possible with past relevant alternatives, including exact text reuse, which returns lexically similar documents; topic modeling, which returns topically similar documents; or an array of alternative approaches. We devise an approach to providing out-of-sample measures of performance (precision, recall, F1) and show that our approach outperforms relevant alternatives by a large margin. We apply our approach to an important case study: The spread of Russian claims about the development of a Ukrainian bioweapons program in U.S. mainstream and fringe news websites. While we focus on news in this application, our approach can be applied more broadly to the study of propaganda, misinformation, diffusion of policy and cultural objects, among other topics.