Russian Propaganda Hits Its MarkExperimentally Testing the Impact of Russian Propaganda and Counter-Interventions
This RAND report, the third in a four-part series on foreign election interference, uses a randomized controlled trial with actual Russian propaganda memes to test how Americans react to the content and whether brief interventions can blunt its impact. The findings confirm what was previously assumed but rarely demonstrated experimentally: Russian content works as designed, generating strong partisan reactions and proving likeable and shareable for audiences whose politics align with the meme. Two interventions reduced that engagement—revealing the Russian source of the content, and showing a short media literacy video—with the strongest effects concentrated among Partisan Left (New York Times–reading, left-leaning) and Partisan Right (Fox News and far-right outlet–consuming) audiences. The authors recommend exploring a third-party plug-in to unmask state-sponsored content, testing generalized warnings and inoculation approaches that pair warnings with weakened example memes, and treating low-cost social media literacy efforts as scalable supplements to traditional media literacy programming.