Detecting Propagators of Disinformation on Twitter Using Quantitative Discursive Analysis

10/11/2022
by   Mark M. Bailey, et al.
0

Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming a top priority for government entities in order to protect the integrity of democratic processes. This study presents a method of identifying Russian disinformation bots on Twitter using centering resonance analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore community detection. The data reflect a significant degree of discursive dissimilarity between known Russian disinformation bots and a control set of Twitter users during the timeframe of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The data also demonstrate statistically significant classification capabilities (MCC = 0.9070) based on community clustering. The prediction algorithm is very effective at identifying true positives (bots), but is not able to resolve true negatives (non-bots) because of the lack of discursive similarity between control users. This leads to a highly sensitive means of identifying propagators of disinformation with a high degree of discursive similarity on Twitter, with implications for limiting the spread of disinformation that could impact democratic processes.

READ FULL TEXT
research
06/26/2023

A study on information disorders on social networks during the Chilean social outbreak and COVID-19 pandemic

Information disorders on social media can have a significant impact on c...
research
01/21/2020

The stability of Twitter metrics: A study on unavailable Twitter mentions of scientific publications

This paper investigates the stability of Twitter counts of scientific pu...
research
02/02/2018

Allegation of scientific misconduct increases Twitter attention

The web-based microblogging system Twitter is a very popular altmetrics ...
research
05/21/2020

Automatic Detection of Influential Actors in Disinformation Networks

The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct ...
research
05/07/2021

The Shadowy Lives of Emojis: An Analysis of a Hacktivist Collective's Use of Emojis on Twitter

Emojis have established themselves as a popular means of communication i...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset