Illuminating an Ecosystem of Partisan Websites

This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally curated list of 668 hyper-partisan websites and their corresponding Facebook pages, and identify key characteristics that mediate the traffic flow within this ecosystem. We uncover a pattern of new websites being established in the run up to the elections, and abandoned after. Such websites form an ecosystem, creating links from one website to another, and by `liking' each others' Facebook pages. These practices are highly effective in directing user traffic internally within the ecosystem in a highly partisan manner, with right-leaning sites linking to and liking other right-leaning sites and similarly left-leaning sites linking to other sites on the left, thus forming a filter bubble amongst news producers similar to the filter bubble which has been widely observed among consumers of partisan news. Whereas there is activity along both left- and right-leaning sites, right-leaning sites are more evolved, accounting for a disproportionate number of abandoned websites and partisan internal links. We also examine demographic characteristics of consumers of hyper-partisan news and find that some of the more populous demographic groups in the US tend to be consumers of more right-leaning sites.Comment: Published at The Web Conference 2018 (WWW 2018). Please cite the WWW versio

Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media

In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news sources in the alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194 sources. We find that content sharing happens in tightly formed communities, and these communities represent relatively homogeneous portions of the media landscape. Through a mix-method analysis, we find several primary content sharing behaviors. First, we find that the vast majority of shared articles are only shared with similar news sources (i.e. same community). Second, we find that despite these echo-chambers of sharing, specific sources, such as The Drudge Report, mix content from both mainstream and conspiracy communities. Third, we show that while these differing communities do not always share news articles, they do report on the same events, but often with competing and counter-narratives. Overall, we find that the news is homogeneous within communities and diverse in between, creating different spirals of sameness.Comment: Published at ICWSM 201

Who let the trolls out? Towards understanding state-sponsored trolls

Recent evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors to manipulate public opinion on the Web. Campaigns revolving around major political events are enacted via mission-focused ?trolls." While trolls are involved in spreading disinformation on social media, there is little understanding of how they operate, what type of content they disseminate, how their strategies evolve over time, and how they influence the Web's in- formation ecosystem. In this paper, we begin to address this gap by analyzing 10M posts by 5.5K Twitter and Reddit users identified as Russian and Iranian state-sponsored trolls. We compare the behavior of each group of state-sponsored trolls with a focus on how their strategies change over time, the different campaigns they embark on, and differences between the trolls operated by Russia and Iran. Among other things, we find: 1) that Russian trolls were pro-Trump while Iranian trolls were anti-Trump; 2) evidence that campaigns undertaken by such actors are influenced by real-world events; and 3) that the behavior of such actors is not consistent over time, hence detection is not straightforward. Using Hawkes Processes, we quantify the influence these accounts have on pushing URLs on four platforms: Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab. In general, Russian trolls were more influential and efficient in pushing URLs to all the other platforms with the exception of /pol/ where Iranians were more influential. Finally, we release our source code to ensure the reproducibility of our results and to encourage other researchers to work on understanding other emerging kinds of state-sponsored troll accounts on Twitter.https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.03130.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Information disorder, the Triumvirate, and COVID-19: How media outlets, foreign state intrusion, and the far-right diaspora drive the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement

Information disorder has become an increasing concern in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election. With the state of the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly evolving in all facets, the vaccination debate has become increasingly polarized and subjected to a form of politics based around identity markers such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, and ideology. At the forefront of this is the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement that has gained mainstream attention, leading to conflict with pro-vaccinationists. This has paved the way for exploitation by subversive elements such as, foreign state-backed disinformation campaigns, alternative news outlets, and right-wing influencers who spread false and misleading information, or disinformation, on COVID-19 in order to promote polarization of the vaccine debate through identity politics. Disinformation spread sows confusion and disorder, leading to the erosion of social cohesion as well as the potential for real-world conflict and violence. As a result, the article below will generate further understanding of the modern-day spread of disinformation, the strategies and tactics utilized by state and non-state actors, the effects of its exposure, and the social-psychological processes involved in its spread and resonance. Furthermore, in countering this phenomenon, this article recommends a collaborative framework involving emphasis on critical media literacy skills, citizen participation, and development of counter-offensive capabilities towards state-backed information operations

Novel weapons: the invasion of fake news and the evolution of political news ecosystems

In this dissertation, I work to answer the question: how are recent attempts to insert fake news into political news ecosystems similar to and different from previous attempts? To this end, I present a historical timeline of major technological shifts that have altered political news ecosystems, create a new framework for analyzing how fake news producers use social media as a novel weapon to help fake news invade and thrive within political news ecosystems, and develop new terminology to discuss large-scale trolling tactics used to disrupt political news ecosystems. To develop the novel weapons framework for this study, I first identify and then examine three aspects of social media that are reappropriated to transform it into a novel weapon: hashtags, bots, and trolling. Then, I unpack how fake news producers and disseminators leveraged hashtags, bots, and trolling in tandem to create more complex systems that were able to introduce and disseminate fake news that went relatively unnoticed by the general public. From here, I enact this framework, applying it to the fake news surrounding the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In doing so, I demonstrate that the novel weapons framework is easily applicable and able to provide an analytical depiction not only of the initial infiltration of fake news into a political news ecosystem but also the tactics that are used to help it thrive. My recalibration of the novel weapons framework aims to expand ecology theory in the field of Rhetoric and Composition by adapting invasive species theory and the novel weapons hypothesis to create a lens through which we can analyze how new actors or agents enter and manipulate digital ecologies. However, rather than focus on individual actors circulating fake news, this framework allows us to identify and focus on the systemic and ecological invasion of fake news.. Additionally, this framework provides a historical lens with which one can observe or analyze how the invasive species’ role or relationship with the ecosystem fluctuates over time. Lastly, through the development of the novel weapons framework, I developed new terminology in order to differentiate between the umbrella term of troll and the large entities that use trolling tactics for much higher stakes. In this dissertation, such bad actors and tactics are referred to as organized, agenda-driven, strategic trolls or OASTs. By separating entities like foreign governments and politically affiliated organizations that use trolling tactics from the colloquial term troll, I also separates them from the stereotypes and cultural frameworks that view trolls as minimal threats, annoyances, singular people, or subversive tactics to oppressive and bigoted language and ideologies. Creating this distinction allows us to focus on the more complex levels and higher stakes that are involved when dealing with OASTs. This new terminology now fits the impact that these entities can create. Overall, then, this dissertation develops a new framework for studying and analyzing fake news, the expansion of terminology when discussing trolls, and the practical application of the novel weapons framework.Thesis (Ph. D.

Where We Go One, We Go All : QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing

“Where We Go One, We Go All”: QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing When critics admonish their opponents for circulating mere conspiracy theories, they are disparaging them for subscribing to facile accounts of socio-historical phenomena that are more sophisticated and aleatory than such heavy-handed narratives apprehend. Unfortunately, this kind of disavowal has the side-effect of precluding conspiracy theories from more serious philosophical consideration. Arguably the most notorious information age conspiracy theory of the moment is QAnon, a byzantine, messianic truther echo-system that has recently irrupted into mainstream public consciousness. QAnon derives its name from “Q,” a lurid, anonymous, putatively omniscient insider who has been dropping missives on message boards about Donald Trump’s clandestine war with a satanic, sex-trafficking, election-fixing cabal that lurks beneath the liberal establishment. In order to engage with QAnon as a cultural phenomenon, my article probes the rhetorical coordinates of the popular concept of conspiracy theory through optics provided by Kenneth Burke and Jodi Dean. Drawing on the recent media scholarship of Carrie Rentschler, Kate Starbird, and John Durham Peters, I then examine QAnon culture as a misguided activist modality of witnessing (what Alain Badiou might call a “pseudo-Event”) precipitated, in no small part, by rhetorical and algorithmic architecture that subtends an ever-increasing proportion of human subjectivity. I conclude with some reflections on the viability of what media theorist Jonathan Sterne terms an intervention