It’s been more than two years since the 2016 presidential election, and the United States is still piecing together Russia’s propaganda-filled interference in U.S. political conversations on social media.

According to a February 2018 poll by The University of Texas at Austin and The Texas Tribune, 40 percent of Texans believe Russian interference played a role in the outcome of the 2016 election; and in their most recent poll, 41 percent disapprove of how the investigation into Russian meddling is being handled, leading many to ask, “How did this all happen?”

“From a basic democratic perspective, it is absolutely critical for us to know whether the entire premise of the country itself has been tampered with,” says UT Austin psychology postdoctoral researcher Ryan Boyd.

He and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research analyzed Facebook ads and Twitter troll accounts run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) to determine how people with differing political ideologies were targeted and pitted against each other through this “largely unsophisticated and low-budget” operation. To learn more about the study and its findings, we asked Boyd the following questions:

Q. Why is it important to continue studying the interference in the 2016 election?

In the U.S., it is a core principle that we have the right to make informed decisions about our own government and collective destiny. By better understanding how interference occurred, we can understand how to best protect those core tenets. Aside from this — and from a pretty basic scientific perspective — it’s generally important to understand what is actually happening in the world around us. Whether or not you have a vested interest in election interference, knowing the truth is valuable in its own right.

Q. When did the IRA begin disseminating political propaganda on social media, and were they successful from the very beginning?

According to the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the operations date back to 2014 and continued well past the 2016 presidential election. However, the degree to which they were actually successful is another question. Especially early on in their influence operation, the IRA appears to have been doing a lot of trial-and-error testing, with several early attempts appearing to have made little impact — for example, trying to play liberals and conservatives off of each other on LGBTQ issues. It wasn’t until later that they had moderately more success by amplifying racial tensions in the U.S.

Q. Are there any themes that the IRA focused on more than others?

Probably the longest-running theme of the IRA ads was attempting to divide people on issues of civil rights. Regardless of the specific topic (e.g., law enforcement officers, Second Amendment rights, racial issues), they seem to have been trying to get people to believe that the “other side” were the bad guys, and that people who aren’t like you are trying to hurt you or threaten you in some way. The goal appears to have been to make people afraid and hateful towards anyone who is different, regardless of what those differences are.