The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues

US Presidential election 2012 prediction using census corrected Twitter model

Unpublished Reports</p

From Transmission to Participation: A Case Study of Democratic Debate at the BBC African Services

This thesis is about the blurring boundaries between audiences and producers as a result of new social media technology and new approaches to journalism in international broadcasting to Africa, commonly referred to as participatory journalism. Audience participation, it has been suggested, can foster stronger democracy through engaging citizens in democratic debate or in the BBC World Service words, ‘a global conversation’. Informed by deliberative democracy and dialogue theory, I use dialogic deliberation as a critical evaluative framework to understand the relationship between participatory journalism and democratic debate. This research goes beyond existing studies about participatory journalism by focusing on the relationship between a British broadcaster and social media audiences in Africa, thus contributing to a new understanding of media power and transnational deliberation between the Global North and the Global South. The work draws on ethnographic data collected through participant observation at the BBC African services in London and on social media through three mediated moments a) a crowd sourced Nigerian Election map b) the launch of a new audience led programme and c) Facebook discussions about football. Through unique access to both the newsroom, the BBC’s own web analytics systems, and by using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I demonstrate how it is changing journalistic and audience practices, and not social media technology by itself that is contributing to advancing international democratic debate. I also found that in order to allow for a more inclusive and accessible democratic debate, journalists need to give up their gatekeeping culture and use a more dialogic approach to participation including; inclusion and equality that allow personal storytelling, reciprocity and respect in debates, self-reflection of their own values and mutual exploration of news topics together with participating audiences

Technologically Mediated Discourse and Information Exchange through Medium Specific Syntactical Features: The 2012 Presidential Election on Twitter

Political discourse has been historically constrained by geographic proximity of participants. The introduction of the Internet and specifically social media has altered these geographic constraints and political discourse is now one of the most prevalent activities in social media. The increasing use of technology to acquire political information and participate in the political process in the United States creates a gap between what is understood about political activity in a democratic society and the specific technological features people use. As more individuals begin to use technology for political activity, understanding how the technology is used becomes increasingly important. Previous research exploring political discourse on social media has focused on one discrete event or a narrow time period. This narrow focus limits the understanding of the complex environment that comprises an election. This study takes a longitudinal approach and uses network analysis, co-occurrence analysis and temporal frequency analysis to examine a 53 million Twitter message (tweet) corpus collected during the 2012 Presidential Election (August 20, 2012 - November 13, 2012) to understand how individuals use Twitter to engage in political discourse. The queries used to compose the dataset were theoretically informed based on democratic theory and previous socio-technical research. This study makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, this study identifies that individuals use syntactical features differently in the context of an acute event such as a debate. Second, this study indicates that, although candidates and media are the most talked about and talked to, these interactions elicit no response. Third, this study reveals that information shared through URLs was predominantly user-generated content from Twitter and mass media information suggesting a reflexive information-sharing environment. This study illustrates that even with the availability of the numerous technological and syntactical features to facilitate interactions and share information, there is still a limited realization of the promise that technologies such as Twitter afford. Instead of fundamentally changing the political discourse process by having individuals use it for two-way communication, Twitter amplifies the existing political environment where there is limited cohesive discourse and communication is one-way.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201