Прогнозирование политических предпочтений в социальных сетях (на материале ВКонтакте)

The authors hypothesize that textual information posted on personal pages on social media reflects the political views of users to some extent. Therefore, this textual information can be used to predict political views on social media. The authors conduct experiments on textual data from user pages and test two machine learning methods to classify pages that declare different political preferences. To undertake a study, the authors collected anonymous open textual data of users of the VKontakte social network (the number of pages is 10 123). Data collection was carried out using the VKontakte Application Programming Interface (VK API). As a result of the analysis of the collected data, the authors discovered two types of textual information. The first is a text filled by the user by selecting one of several possible values (binary or categorical variables). The field “Political Views” is one of these text fields, it provides nine options for selection. The second type of text information includes information entered by the user in an arbitrary form (interests, activities, etc.). The authors trained and tested two machine learning models to predict users’ political views based on the remaining text information from their pages: a) linear support vector classifier using text representations from the bag-of-words model; b) neural network using Multilingual BERT text embeddings. The results show that the models sufficiently successfully perform binary classification of users who have polar political views (for example, communists – libertarians, communists – ultra-conservatives). Nevertheless, the results for the groups of users that have close political views are significantly lower. In addition, the authors investigated the assumption that users often indicate “indifferent” political views as “moderate”. The authors classified the groups of users who declare indifferent or moderate views (the two largest categories in our dataset) and users who indicated other political preferences. The results demonstrate a sufficiently high performance for the classification of custom pages based on these two political views

Parsimonious Data: How a single Facebook like predicts voting behaviour in multiparty systems

Recently, two influential PNAS papers have shown how our preferences for 'Hello Kitty' and 'Harley Davidson', obtained through Facebook likes, can accurately predict details about our personality, religiosity, political attitude and sexual orientation (Konsinski et al. 2013; Youyou et al 2015). In this paper, we make the claim that though the wide variety of Facebook likes might predict such personal traits, even more accurate and generalizable results can be reached through applying a contexts-specific, parsimonious data strategy. We built this claim by predicting present day voter intention based solely on likes directed toward posts from political actors. Combining the online and offline, we join a subsample of surveyed respondents to their public Facebook activity and apply machine learning classifiers to explore the link between their political liking behaviour and actual voting intention. Through this work, we show how even a single well-chosen Facebook like, can reveal as much about our political voter intention as hundreds of random likes. Further, by including the entire political like history of the respondents, our model reaches prediction accuracies above previous multiparty studies (60-70%). We conclude the paper by discussing how a parsimonious data strategy applied, with some limitations, allow us to generalize our findings to the 1,4 million Danes with at least one political like and even to other political multiparty systems

The ideology of media. Measuring the political leaning of Spanish news media through Twitter users’ interactions

The news media have a strong influence on people’s perception of reality. But despite claims to objectivity, media organizations are, in general, politically biased (Patterson & Donsbach, 1996; Gaebler, 2017). The link between news media outlets and political organizations has been a critical question in political science and communication studies. To assess the closeness between the news media and particular political organizations, scholars have used different methods such as content analysis, undertaking surveys or adopting a political economy view. With the advent of social networks, new sources of data are now available to measure the relationship between media organizations and parties. Assuming that users coherently retweet political and news information (Wong, Tan, Sen & Chiang, 2016), and drawing on the retweet overlap network (RON) method (Guerrero-Solé, 2017), this research uses people’s perceived ideology of Spanish political parties (CIS, 2020) to propose a measure of the ideology of news media in Spain. Results show that scores align with the result of previous research on the ideology of the news media (Ceia, 2020). We also find that media outlets are, in general, politically polarized with two groups or clusters of news media being close to the left-wing parties UP and PSOE, and the other to the right-wing and far-right parties Cs, PP, and Vox. This research also underlines the media’s ideological stability over time.Los medios de comunicación tienen una fuerte influencia sobre la percepción de la realidad que tiene la gente. A pesar de su pretensión de objetividad, los medios tienen, en general, un sesgo político (Patterson & Donsbach, 1996; Gaebler, 2017). La relación entre los medios y las organizaciones políticas ha sido una cuestión crucial en los estudios de ciencias políticas y comunicación. Para evaluar la proximidad entre los medios de comunicación y organizaciones políticas concretas, los investigadores han empleado distintos métodos como el análisis de contenido, las encuestas o la adopción de una visión político-económica. Con la llegada de las redes sociales, aparecen nuevas fuentes de datos disponibles para medir la relación entre los medios de comunicación y los partidos políticos. Asumiendo que los usuarios retuitean coherentemente información política y mediática (Wong, Tan, Sen & Chiang, 2016), y haciendo uso del método RON (Retweet Overlap Network) (Guerrero-Solé, 2017), este estudio utiliza la ideología percibida por la población de los partidos políticos españoles (CIS, 2020) para proponer una medida de la ideología de los medios de comunicación en España. Los resultados muestran que las puntuaciones obtenidas siguen la línea de estudios realizados previamente sobre la ideología de los medios (Ceia, 2020). También se ha descubierto que los medios, en general, están polarizados políticamente, con dos grupos de medios más próximos a los partidos de izquierda UP y PSOE, y los otros a los partidos de derecha y ultraderecha Cs, PP y Vox. Esta investigación también remarca la estabilidad ideológica de los medios a lo largo del tiempo

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Understanding the Implications of Social Media Usage in the Electoral Processes and Campaigns in Nigeria

This paper sheds light on the implications of social media usage in the Nigerian electioneering campaigns and political processes. This study is anchored on the agenda setting and uses and gratification theory. The study found that in the Nigerian 2015 and 2011 general elections, social media was employed due to its participatory nature. It was used as a platform for political campaign organization, electioneering crusades, ideological trumpeting exercises, and mobilization of voters. Specifically, in the 2015 elections, it was found that during the collation of results, citizen journalists and the civil society used social media to inform the public as regards the results in several states across the country. Social media was thus applied to influence the thoughts of many young people, increasing their political awareness and cognizance, which in turn resulted in an unbelievable presidential win of the opposition party All Progressives Congress (APC) over the ruling party People's Democratic Party (PDP). Conversely, social media were also used as a weapon to undermine and even destroy the image of political parties. Character assassination, violence, and abuses (hate) speeches were carried out, which further increased the divide between the North and Southern part of the country. This study recommends that political messages should be based on truth and full of information that will enable the electorate to make a proper decision that will assist in bringing the right people into governance. Future investigators are required to examine computational propaganda in electioneering campaigns in Nigeria. Keywords: Electioneering campaigns, Nigeria, political processes, propaganda, social media