Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda during the UK-EU Referendum

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (1) the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates, (2) different perspectives on the issue utilize different levels of automation, and (3) less than 1 percent of sampled accounts generate almost a third of all the messages.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 2 table

Telecom Policy Across the Former Yugoslavia: Incentives, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

What is the recipe for good information policy? Hosman and Howard address this in an emerging economy context through case studies of six states that arose following the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. These new nations pursued differing information policy paths that led to diverse outcomes. The authors find, in general, conventional positive outcomes supporting policies for privatization, liberalization, and competition; but at the same time discover many counterintuitive outcomes based on each country’s unique circumstances. General rules are good, but in specific cases alternative paths can also lead to success

What Best Explains Successful Protest Cascades? ICT s and the Fuzzy Causes of the Arab Spring

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97489/1/misr12020.pd

Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring

Did digital media really "cause" the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy's fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world's most entrenched dictators. Howard and Hussain find that the complex causal recipe includes several economic, political and cultural factors, but that digital media is consistently one of the most important sufficient and necessary conditions for explaining both the fragility of regimes and the success of social movements. This book looks at not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the deeper history of creative digital activism throughout the region.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117564/1/Democracy's Fourth Wave.pdfDescription of Democracy's Fourth Wave.pdf : PD

The Dictators’ Digital Dilemma: When Do States Disconnect Their Digital Networks?

When do governments decide to interfere with the Internet, and why? While many observers celebrate the creative use of digital media by activists and civil society leaders, there are a significant number of incidents involving government-led Internet shutdowns. Governments have offered a range of reasons for interfering with digital networks, employed many tactics, and experienced both costs and benefits in doing so.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117569/1/2011_Howard-Agarwal-Hussain_Brookings.pd

Social Media, News and Political Information during the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States?

US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or concentrated in swing states and particular parts of the country? In this data memo we apply a tested dictionary of sources about political news and information being shared over Twitter over a ten day period around the 2016 Presidential Election. Using self-reported location information, we place a third of users by state and create a simple index for the distribution of polarizing content around the country. We find that (1) nationally, Twitter users got more misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news. (2) Users in some states, however, shared more polarizing political news and information than users in other states. (3) Average levels of misinformation were higher in swing states than in uncontested states, even when weighted for the relative size of the user population in each state. We conclude with some observations about the impact of strategically disseminated polarizing information on public life.Comment: Data Mem

The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018

Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters. This report provides the first major analysis of this attack based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). This analysis answers several key questions about the activities of the known IRA accounts. In this analysis, we investigate how the IRA exploited the tools and platforms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact US users. We identify which aspects of the IRA’s campaign strategy got the most traction on social media and the means of microtargeting US voters with particular messages. • Between 2013 and 2018, the IRA’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns reached tens of millions of users in the United States. o Over 30 million users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way. o Peaks in advertising and organic activity often correspond to important dates in the US political calendar, crises, and international events. o IRA activities focused on the US began on Twitter in 2013 but quickly evolved into a multi-platform strategy involving Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube amongst other platforms. o The most far reaching IRA activity is in organic posting, not advertisements. • Russia\u27s IRA activities were designed to polarize the US public and interfere in elections by: o campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to distrust US institutions; o encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and o spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum. • Surprisingly, these campaigns did not stop once Russia\u27s IRA was caught interfering in the 2016 election. Engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters. o The highest peak of IRA ad volume on Facebook is in April 2017—the month of the Syrian missile strike, the use of the Mother of All Bombs on ISIS tunnels in eastern Afghanistan, and the release of the tax reform plan. o IRA posts on Instagram and Facebook increased substantially after the election, with Instagram seeing the greatest increase in IRA activity. o The IRA accounts actively engaged with disinformation and practices common to Russian “trolling”. Some posts referred to Russian troll factories that flooded online conversations with posts, others denied being Russian trolls, and some even complained about the platforms’ alleged political biases when they faced account suspension