Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The goal of this research is to understand whether general Twitter users changed their behavior in the year following first contact from an IRA account. We compare the before and after behavior of contacted users to determine whether there were differences in their mean tweet count, the sentiment of their tweets, and the frequency and sentiment of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump or @HillaryClinton. Our results indicate that users overall exhibited statistically significant changes in behavior across most of these metrics, and that those users that engaged with the IRA generally showed greater changes in behavior.

翻译：特别是,俄罗斯支持的互联网研究署(IRA)被确定为2016年美国总统选举前在推特上散布错误信息的主要来源。这项研究的目的是了解一般推特用户在第一次从IRA账户联系之后的一年里是否改变了他们的行为。我们比较了接触过的用户之前和之后的行为,以确定他们的平均推文计数、他们的推文情绪以及提及@realDonaldTrump 或@HillaryClinton的推文的频率和情绪是否存在差异。我们的结果显示,用户总体上在大多数这些指标的行为中表现出了统计上的重大变化,而那些与IRA打交道的用户通常表现出更大的行为变化。