Leaders or Followers? A Temporal Analysis of Tweets from IRA Trolls

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing trending terms on Twitter to identify cases in which the IRA leads or follows other users. Our analysis focuses on over 38M tweets posted between 2016 and 2017 from IRA users (n=3,613), journalists (n=976), members of Congress (n=526), and politically engaged users from the general public (n=71,128). We find that the IRA tends to lead on topics related to the 2016 election, race, and entertainment, suggesting that these are areas both of strategic importance as well having the highest potential impact. Furthermore, we identify topics where the IRA has been relatively ineffective, such as tweets on military, political scandals, and violent attacks. Despite many tweets on these topics, the IRA rarely leads the conversation and thus has little opportunity to influence it. We offer our proposed methodology as a way to track the strategic choices of future influence operations in real-time.Comment: ICWSM 202

Trusted CI Webinar: FABRIC with Anita Nikolich

Testbeds can be great for trying out new ideas and not taking down a production network, or they can be useless and impossible to figure out. FABRIC took the best of past testbeds and is creating a new, useful national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge, exploratory research at-scale in computer networking, security, machine learning, distributed computing and applications. It will be a nation-wide high-speed (100-1000 Gbps) network interconnecting major research centers and computing facilities that will allow researchers, operators and engineers to develop and experiment with new distributed application, compute and network architectures not possible today. FABRIC nodes can store and process information "in the network" in ways not possible in the current Internet, which will lead to completely new networking protocols, architectures and applications that address pressing problems with performance, security and adaptability in the Internet. Reaching deep into university campuses, FABRIC will connect university researchers and their local compute clusters and scientific instruments to the larger FABRIC infrastructure. The infrastructure will also provide access to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. This experimental facility will allow multiple experiments to be conducted simultaneously, and is capable of incorporating real traffic and real users into experiments. For more information about FABRIC visit https://www.fabric-testbed.net.NSF Grant # 1935966NSF Grant # 1920430Ope

Trusted CI Webinar: FABRIC with Anita Nikolich

Testbeds can be great for trying out new ideas and not taking down a production network, or they can be useless and impossible to figure out. FABRIC took the best of past testbeds and is creating a new, useful national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge, exploratory research at-scale in computer networking, security, machine learning, distributed computing and applications. It will be a nation-wide high-speed (100-1000 Gbps) network interconnecting major research centers and computing facilities that will allow researchers, operators and engineers to develop and experiment with new distributed application, compute and network architectures not possible today. FABRIC nodes can store and process information "in the network" in ways not possible in the current Internet, which will lead to completely new networking protocols, architectures and applications that address pressing problems with performance, security and adaptability in the Internet. Reaching deep into university campuses, FABRIC will connect university researchers and their local compute clusters and scientific instruments to the larger FABRIC infrastructure. The infrastructure will also provide access to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. This experimental facility will allow multiple experiments to be conducted simultaneously, and is capable of incorporating real traffic and real users into experiments. For more information about FABRIC visit https://www.fabric-testbed.net.NSF Grant # 1935966NSF Grant # 1920430Ope