Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate

Although many cyber security attacks focus on exploiting software, hardware or communication vulnerabilities of organizations, these are not the only threats to cyber security. Russian trolls – Russians “who misinterpret their identities with the purpose of promoting discord”, bots – “accounts that automate content promotion”, and content polluters – “accounts that disseminate malware and unsolicited content” spread false information with the intention of causing conflict among users of social media services. One of the most common methods these bad actors use to spread disinformation online is amplification. This is the process of boosting support behind one or many positions of a debate in order to create a false consensus or equivalency. Amplification causes people to view an argument that is not credible or dangerous as credible and causes a strife among people. This article statistically measures the contribution of Russian trolls, bots and content polluters to see if they contribute more to discourse around the vaccine debate than regular users.

The authors investigated these actors on twitter and compared the rate of their vaccine related tweets to that of the average user. They found that Russian trolls, bots and content polluters tweeted about vaccination at a measurably higher rate than regular users. They also found that content polluters posted more anti vaccine content, while Russian trolls posted both pro and anti vaccine content. This implies that the goal of Russian trolls is to create a false equivalence that breaks down consensus on vaccination.