The 2015–2017 Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)’s coordinated information operation is one of the earliest and most studied of the social media age. A set of 38 city-specific inauthentic “newsfeeds” made up a large, underanalyzed part of its English-language output. We label 1,000 tweets from the IRA newsfeeds and a matched set of real news sources from those same cities with up to five labels indicating the tweet represents a world in unrest and, if so, of what sort. We train a natural language classifier to extend these labels to 268 k IRA tweets and 1.13 million control tweets. Compared to the controls, tweets from the IRA were 34% more likely to represent unrest, especially crime and identity danger, and this difference jumped to about twice as likely in the months immediately before the election. Agenda setting by media is well-known and well-studied, but this weaponization by a coordinated information operation is novel.

2015-2017 年俄罗斯互联网研究机构 (IRA) 的协调信息运营是社交媒体时代最早、研究最多的机构之一。一组 38 个特定于城市的不真实的“新闻源”构成了其英语输出的很大一部分未充分分析。我们标记了来自 IRA 新闻源的 1,000 条推文和来自这些城市的一组匹配的真实新闻来源，最多有五个标签表明该推文代表一个处于动荡之中的世界，如果是这样，那么是什么样的。我们训练一个自然语言分类器将这些标签扩展到 26.8 万条 IRA 推文和 113 万条控制推文。与对照相比，来自爱尔兰共和军的推文代表骚乱的可能性要高 34%，尤其是犯罪和身份危险，而这种差异在选举前几个月的可能性跃升至两倍左右。