Russian Disinformation about the US Election: AI Analysis of Narratives

Padalko's Fall 2024 working paper applies machine learning analysis to Russian propaganda narratives during the 2024 US presidential election, identifying the key narrative clusters deployed by Russian state-aligned actors and documenting the sophisticated disinformation strategies and their evolution across the election season. As the companion to the Winter 2025 working paper, it provides the empirical foundation on which the subsequent analysis of LLM grooming and strategic evolution is built.

The value of reading the two Padalko papers together is the longitudinal and methodological continuity: the Fall 2024 paper documents the narrative landscape during the election, the Winter 2025 paper analyses its strategic logic and evolution. Together they constitute the most systematic available ML-based analysis of Russian disinformation in a US electoral context. For practitioners designing AI-assisted narrative monitoring systems, the methodology of these papers is as important as their substantive findings.