DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Tracking Fringe and Coordinated Activity on Twitter Leading Up To the US Capitol Attack

02/09/2023
by   Vishnuprasad Padinjaredath Suresh, et al.
USC Information Sciences Institute
SUPSI
qut
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
0

The aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential Election witnessed an unprecedented attack on the democratic values of the country through the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021. The attack was fueled by the proliferation of conspiracy theories and misleading claims about the integrity of the election pushed by political elites and fringe communities on social media. In this study, we explore the evolution of fringe content and conspiracy theories on Twitter in the seven months leading up to the Capitol attack. We examine the suspicious coordinated activity carried out by users sharing fringe content, finding evidence of common adversarial manipulation techniques ranging from targeted amplification to manufactured consensus. Further, we map out the temporal evolution of, and the relationship between, fringe and conspiracy theories, which eventually coalesced into the rhetoric of a stolen election, with the hashtag #stopthesteal, alongside QAnon-related narratives. Our findings further highlight how social media platforms offer fertile ground for the widespread proliferation of conspiracies during major societal events, which can potentially lead to offline coordinated actions and organized violence.

READ FULL TEXT

page 3

page 6

page 7

page 8

07/17/2021

Characterizing Online Engagement with Disinformation and Conspiracies in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Identifying and characterizing disinformation in political discourse on ...
05/15/2020

Analyzing Temporal Relationships between Trending Terms on Twitter and Urban Dictionary Activity

As an online, crowd-sourced, open English-language slang dictionary, the...
04/27/2022

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country...
02/21/2023

Sedition Hunters: A Quantitative Study of the Crowdsourced Investigation into the 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack

Social media platforms have enabled extremists to organize violent event...
02/01/2023

You are a Bot! – Studying the Development of Bot Accusations on Twitter

The characterization and detection of social bots with their presumed ab...
10/03/2019

Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash

Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also dis...