9 research outputs found
Socio-Linguistic Characteristics of Coordinated Inauthentic Accounts
Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions
and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to
interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five
million-tweet multilingual dataset related to the 2017 French presidential
election, when a major information campaign led by Russia called "#MacronLeaks"
took place. We utilize heuristics to identify coordinated inauthentic accounts
and detect attitudes, concerns and emotions within their tweets, collectively
known as socio-linguistic characteristics. We find that coordinated accounts
retweet other coordinated accounts far more than expected by chance, while
being exceptionally active just before the second round of voting.
Concurrently, socio-linguistic characteristics reveal that coordinated accounts
share tweets promoting a candidate at three times the rate of non-coordinated
accounts. Coordinated account tactics also varied in time to reflect news
events and rounds of voting. Our analysis highlights the utility of
socio-linguistic characteristics to inform researchers about tactics of
coordinated accounts and how these may feed into online social manipulation.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure