Mind games: A temporal sentiment analysis of the political messages of the Internet Research Agency on Facebook and Twitter

This study examines the temporal dynamics of emotional appeals in Russian campaign messages used in the 2016 election. Communications on two giant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are analyzed to assess emotion in message content and targeting that may have contributed to influencing people. The current study conducts both computational and qualitative investigations of the Internet Research Agency's (IRA) emotion-based strategies across three different dimensions of message propagation: the platforms themselves, partisan identity as targeted by the source, and social identity in politics, using African American identity as a case. We examine (1) the emotional flows along the campaign timeline, (2) emotion-based strategies of the Russian trolls that masked left- and right-leaning identities, and (3) emotion in messages projecting to or about African American identity and representation. Our findings show sentiment strategies that differ between Facebook and Twitter, with strong evidence of negative emotion targeting Black identity.