Russia exploited social media platforms to target and engage U.S. military veterans and active-duty troops with anti-government propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other disinformation, according to a new study.

The research, published Monday by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, traced the reach of three websites with clear links to the Russian government. The content produced by the websites targeted veterans and troops on both sides of the political spectrum and included everything from disinformation about national security and international affairs to Russia-focused propaganda and anti-government conspiracy theories aimed at sowing discord and undermining trust in U.S. democracy.

The study found that the targeted content succeeded in achieving “significant and persistent interactions” between Russian-linked accounts and U.S. military personnel on Twitter, indicating that the messages are being noticed and reaching their targets — and that they may be having an impact. Importantly, the analysis also revealed that pro-Trump users (both human and automated “bot” accounts) often functioned as a sort of middleman in the interactions on Twitter, either wittingly or unwittingly connecting the Russian-linked accounts to the accounts of U.S. veterans and active duty personnel.

“We’ve found an entire ecosystem of junk news about national security issues that is deliberately crafted for U.S. veterans and active military personnel,” Philip Howard, the study’s lead author, told McClatchy News. “It’s a complex blend of content with a Russian view of the world — wild rumors and conspiracies.”

Tracking The Spread of Russian Propaganda Targeting US Military

The study looked at how social media was used to amplify the content from three websites, all of which have clear ties to the Russian government and specialize in producing propaganda and disinformation targeting current and former U.S. military personnel:

veteranstoday.com, which in 2013 started publishing content from New Eastern Outlook, a geopolitics journal of the Kremlin-charted Russian Academy of Sciences.

veteransnewsnow.com, a “sister-site” of Veterans Today that in 2013 began publishing content from the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Moscow think tank run by Yuri Profokiev, a former head of Moscow’s Communist Party and member of the Soviet Politburo.

southfront.org, which was registered in Moscow in early 2015 and partnered with Veterans Today later that year.

To see how social media helped amplify the content from the Russian-linked websites, the researchers used network mapping to analyze the activity of 12,413 Twitter users and 11,103 Facebook users whose accounts engaged with (followed, mentioned, “liked”, retweeted, etc.) and/or shared content from one or more of the websites between April 2 and May 2, 2017.

Based on content-related activity patterns and social network associations, the study categorized the accounts into eight groups, or “communities” that overlapped on key characteristics. The categories used to identify communities of Twitter users were similar, though not exactly the same, as the categories used for Facebook users.