Strategic Deception

A growing body of research on state-sponsored social media actors has raised concerns over attempts by hostile states to influence public opinion online. The annexation of Crimea is one such high-profile cases, in which Russia was accused of using media technologies to influence Western publics. I use Twitter’s/X’s and Clemson University’s Anglophone data on Internet Research Agency (IRA) and GRU (Russian military intelligence agency) actors and compare it with other users’ (“non-troll”) tweets on the topic of the annexation to understand how the linguistic and discursive practices employed by the state-sponsored actors identified by Twitter/X as “Russian trolls” evolve with time and context. I use a mixed methods methodological framework, which includes quantitative computational instruments for data collection and processing, qualitative Fairclough’s (2001) Critical Discourse Analysis, tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Bakhtin’s dialogic analysis, and collocation analysis to elucidate two crucial under-researched aspects of the annexation: (a) the annexation as a pivotal moment that reshaped Russia’s social media landscape and (b) Russia’s turbulent societal and social media environment after the annexation, which created fertile ground for language change. I argue that that most trolls’ tweets align with the Kremlin’s master narratives about the annexation, however, there are some significant outliers, which are thoroughly examined. The use of language observed is strategic, and the changes in language use indicate important differences between “troll” and “non-troll” messages.