Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election: Tools for Detecting Online Election Interference
This RAND report, the second in a series on foreign information efforts targeting U.S. elections, maps the advocacy communities arguing about the 2020 election on Twitter and identifies what appears to be active interference within them—trolls pushing hyperpartisan themes through fake personas, and superconnector accounts engineered to amplify content across networks. While the origin of the accounts could not be definitively attributed, the activity serves Russian interests and tracks closely with Russia's known interference playbook of sowing division and eroding confidence in American democracy. The authors recommend continuing to innovate detection methods and publicly surfacing the threats, targets, and tactics so that defenders—and voters—can recognize what they're looking at.