2,241 research outputs found
Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on
social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has
come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions
in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S.
Congress' investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election
campaign, with Russia accused of using trolls (malicious accounts created to
manipulate) and bots to spread misinformation and politically biased
information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulation
campaign, taking a closer look at users who re-shared the posts produced on
Twitter by the Russian troll accounts publicly disclosed by U.S. Congress
investigation. We collected a dataset with over 43 million election-related
posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and October 21, 2016, by about 5.7
million distinct users. This dataset included accounts associated with the
identified Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of
all users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables us to
classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative with precision and
recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more
often than liberals and produced 36x more tweets. Additionally, most retweets
of troll content originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas.
Using state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about 4.9%
and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were bots. Text
analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they had a mostly
conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ideologically broad swath of
Twitter users was exposed to Russian Trolls in the period leading up to the
2016 U.S. Presidential election, it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify
their message
Mobilizing the Trump Train: Understanding Collective Action in a Political Trolling Community
Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but
also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political
candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were
considered central in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential
election, which involved difficult mass mobilizations. Political trolls face
unique challenges as they must build their own communities while simultaneously
disrupting others. However, little is known about how political trolls mobilize
sufficient participation to suddenly become problems for others. We performed a
quantitative longitudinal analysis of more than 16 million comments from one of
the most popular and disruptive political trolling communities, the subreddit
/r/The\_Donald (T\D). We use T_D as a lens to understand participation and
collective action within these deviant spaces. In specific, we first study the
characteristics of the most active participants to uncover what might drive
their sustained participation. Next, we investigate how these active
individuals mobilize their community to action. Through our analysis, we
uncover that the most active employed distinct discursive strategies to
mobilize participation, and deployed technical tools like bots to create a
shared identity and sustain engagement. We conclude by providing data-backed
design implications for designers of civic media
Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere
We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users
engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework
that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our
dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a
minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work
for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages.
We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence
and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of
the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make
nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in
affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201
Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: the case of Donald Trump
Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We situate our study in the context of current discussions of audience formation, attention flow, and hybridity in the United States’ political media system. From this we derive propositions concerning how attentive publics aggregate around a particular object, in this case Trump himself, which we test using time series modeling. We also present an exploration of the possible role of automated accounts in these processes. Our results reiterate the media hybridity described by others, while emphasizing the importance of news media coverage in building social media attentive publics.Accepted manuscrip
Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world.
Online political astroturfing-hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online-has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet's promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal-agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign's social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns
Dual screening, public service broadcasting, and political participation in eight Western democracies
We investigate the relationship between political dual screening—that is, watching political contents on television while reading and commenting on them on social media—and political participation across eight Western democracies: Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. Based on custom built online surveys conducted between 2015 and 2016 on samples representative of the adult population with internet access in each country, we test hypotheses on both intra-country and cross-country direct and differential effects of political dual screening on various forms of offline and online political participation. We find a positive correlation between the frequency with which citizens dual screen political content and their overall levels of participation. Such correlation is stronger among respondents with lower levels of interest in politics, suggesting that dual screening has the potential to bridge participatory gaps between citizens who are more and less politically involved. The relationship between dual screening and participation is also significantly stronger in countries whose media systems feature the strongest Public Service Broadcasters. Our findings suggest that dual screening makes a positive contribution to democratic citizenship and political equality, and that it can also help public service media fulfill some of their key functions
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election: Volume 2: Russia\u27s Use of Social Media, with Additional Views
In 2016, Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government\u27s covert support of Russia\u27s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence undertook a study of these events, consistent with its congressional mandate to oversee and conduct oversight of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to include the effectiveness of the Intelligence Community\u27s counterintelligence function. In addition to the work of the professional staff of the Committee, the Committee\u27s findings drew from the input of cybersecurity professionals, social media companies, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and researchers and experts in social network analysis, political content, disinformation, hate speech, algorithms, and automation, working under the auspices of the Committee\u27s Technical Advisory Group (TAG).
The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton\u27s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.
The Committee found that the IRA\u27 s :lnformation warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee\u27s analysis of the IRA\u27s activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, that Russia\u27s, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency. However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump\u27s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him, the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton\u27s campaign
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