What did we do?

Swansea University passed The Sunday Times 20,000 general-election-related tweets sent in the four weeks leading up to the vote by accounts that gave their language or location as Russian. A Twitter account’s primary language is not usually clearly visible on a Twitter profile, but the data obtained by Swansea included that crucial detail. A team of researchers then painstakingly analysed each tweet to determine whether the user had posted positive or negative messages about any of the major parties.

What did we find?

From the tweets expressing a view on a party, the vast majority were pro-Labour or anti-Tory. Indeed, nine out of 10 messages giving a view on Labour were positive and nine out of 10 Conservative messages were negative.