Assessing Inauthentic Networks Commenting on the US Midterms

On October 26, 2022, Twitter released six datasets to the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium, consisting of six distinct inauthentic networks with technical links to China and Iran that had tweeted about the United States’ November 2022 midterm elections. In this post, analysts from the Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Stanford Internet Observatory examine the content and tactics of the networks and their activity related to the US midterms. While some of the content posted by these networks and discussed in this blog post would not typically be in scope for the Election Integrity Partnership, commentary alleging election theft and fraud met our threshold for analysis, and for context we included the broader activity of these inauthentic accounts in this analysis.