"Russia employs a sophisticated social media campaign that includes news tweets, nonattributed comments on web pages, troll and bot social media accounts, and fake hashtag and Twitter campaigns," the introduction to the study says.
Its key conclusions are:
- In the Baltics, Ukraine, and other nearby states, the Kremlin aims to drive wedges between ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking populations and their host governments, NATO, and the European Union
- Farther abroad, the Kremlin attempts to achieve policy paralysis by sowing confusion, stoking fears, and eroding trust in Western and democratic institutions.
If you would like to read and judge the validity of the findings for yourself, the study is available at the RAND Corporation's website.
To better understand the scope of #Russia's propaganda efforts in Eastern Europe, RAND experts analyzed nearly 23 million Russian-language tweets originating from the region.
— RAND Corporation (@RANDCorporation) July 21, 2018
Here's what they found: https://t.co/Ti7WMzK1wO pic.twitter.com/SBfCYMUudr