Engagement with partisan Russian troll tweets during the 2016 U.S. presidential election: a social identity perspective.

This article investigates how operatives from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) used partisan political identities on Twitter to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, focusing on tweets about presidential candidates and political parties. Using a social identity theory framework, the study conceptualizes retweeting as a form of identity performance and finds that persistent tweeting by partisan trolls, especially right-leaning ones, about candidates and parties increased retweet rates, signaling prototypical ingroup membership. Tweets that invoked political outgroups and contained incivility (name-calling) also affected retweet patterns, though incivility and outgroup mentions tended to have substitutional rather than cumulative effects, with nuanced differences between right and left trolls. The findings highlight the strategic use of social media by foreign actors to sow discord through identity-based messaging and underscore the importance of timely platform interventions to mitigate such influence.