Russian Twitter disinformation campaigns reach across the American political spectrum

Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counter-responses from diverse coalitions of users

The filter map: Media and the pursuit of truth and legitimacy

What kinds of media messages should we choose to receive, and how seriously should we take them? These questions are much more urgent now than they were in the pre-digital era, when we had far less control over the information we consumed. Back then, nearly all our media options came from the major TV networks, movie studios, book publishers, radio broadcasters and local news monopolies. Today, anyone can add to our inexhaustible menu of media choices, which continue to expand without pause. With so many choices at our fingertips, filtering becomes a top priority to arrive at any coherent understanding of the world beyond our direct experience. But what principles ought to drive our filtering and interpretive criteria? The standard answer to this question starts from the assumption that many of us don’t always make the best choices about what information to consume. As with food, what appeals to us most immediately is not always the healthiest or most useful — for example, soft news and infotainment are sometimes blamed for emphasizing the most salacious and least consequential aspects of public affairs. But even worse is factually untrue content designed to look authentic (what is sometimes called “fake news”), which usually targets those who agree with the false message. Extreme opinions can be equally harmful, as when they advocate for the systematic injury, oppression, or extermination of entire ethnicities, sexual orientations, or religious groups. I argue that, generally, people are well justified in avoiding such content

Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice

In 2014, a dedicated activist movement--Black Lives Matter (BLM)--ignited an urgent national conversation about police killings of unarmed Black citizens. Online tools have been anecdotally credited as critical in this effort, but researchers are only beginning to evaluate this claim. This research report examines the movement's uses of online media in 2014 and 2015. To do so, we analyze three types of data: 40.8 million tweets, over 100,000 web links, and 40 interviews of BLM activists and allies

How Black Twitter and Other Social Media Communities Interact With Mainstream News

People have been forming communities using digital communication technologies since long before the web as we know it today. Social media are only the latest in a long series of digital forums that have enabled global conversations and connections around nearly any topic imaginable. With its emphasis on public accessibility and real-time content production, Twitter has become a major hub for communities of all types and sizes. The issues and voices of people of color and women have attracted much attention from professional journalists over the past few years.1 Yet many such individuals have criticized journalists’ portrayals and coverage of issues that are important to them. In response, some participants have assumed the role of news creators and distributors, focusing on their communities’ particular concerns.2 Understanding these emerging social subcultures will allow more accurate portrayals of diverse communities and yield insights for better journalistic engagement in the digital age

Black trolls matter : Racial and ideological asymmetries in social media disinformation

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies

Opening Closed Regimes: What was the Role of Social Media during the Arab Spring?

Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders.National Science Foundationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117568/1/2011_Howard-Duffy-Freelon-Hussain-Mari-Mazaid_PITPI.pd

Everyday political talk in the internet-based public sphere

Ever since the advent of the Internet, political communication scholars have debated its potential to facilitate and support public deliberation as a means of revitalizing and extending the public sphere. Much of the debate has focused on the medium’s potential in offering communicative spaces that transcend the limitations of time, space and access (and the traditional mass media) whereby open communication, deliberation and exchange of information among the public can prosper. Following the initial enthusiasm over the possibilities of a more interactive and deliberative electorate, along with the cyber-pessimist response, a growing body of rich empirical research into online deliberation has arisen in its wake. In search of online deliberation, scholars have conducted a broad range of investigations, developing several prominent directions in the field. One popular line of research has been the study of informal political talk through the lens of public sphere ideals.The aim of this chapter is to detail and discuss this growing body of research and its significance. First, I begin by discussing what scholars mean by political talk and why it is thought to be essential for (a more deliberative) democracy. Following this, the major findings to date are set out focusing specifically on three of the most common features of political talk investigated by scholars in the field. I discuss scholarly disagreement and offer my thoughts and critical reflection on the topic. Finally, the chapter ends with several recommendations for future research into informal political talk in the Internet-based public sphere

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

How did Syria’s conflict interact with the broader wave of regional protest known as the Arab Spring? This article uses a unique, complete Twitter dataset of tweets including the word “Syria” in English or Arabic to empirically test how Syria’s conflict was discussed online. The analysis shows a high level of interaction between Syria and other Arab countries through 2011. Other Arab countries experiencing popular protests (“Arab Spring countries”) were referenced far more often in 2011 than were Syria’s immediate neighbors, while keyword analysis shows the framing of the conflict in terms of Syria’s “regime” aligned the conflict with other Arab uprisings. In 2012–2013 this changed sharply, with significantly fewer mentions of other Arab countries, particularly Arab Spring countries, more fundraising and political appeals across the Gulf, and growing Islamization. These findings offer one of the first empirical demonstrations of the integration and disintegration of a unified Arab discourse from 2011 to 2013, with significant implications for theories of the diffusion of protest and ideas

Facilitating Encounters with Political Difference: Engaging Voters with the Living Voters Guide

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a deployment aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: reading, acknowledging, and writing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research

Syria’s socially mediated civil war

Introduction: In this report from the USIP PeaceTech Initiative, a team of scholars from George Washington University and American University analyze the role of social media in Syria\u27s civil war. The report focuses primarily on group dynamics, activist organizations\u27 use of online media, and the relationship between new and traditional media. It draws on a public conference held in Washington, D.C., in September 2012 with Syrian activists, Western journalists, and policy analysts, as well as on a private workshop held in April 2013 at Stanford University with academic researchers and leading research scientists from top technology firms. It presents novel empirical research on Twitter conversations about Syria that demonstrates important new findings about differences across Arabic and English users, and about the emergence of distinct, insular clusters of discourse. This report is part of the ongoing Blogs and Bullets project led by USIP\u27s PeaceTech Initiative, in partnership with George Washington University\u27s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. It builds on two other reports, published in 2010 and 2012: "Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics" and "Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict After the Arab Spring.