IRA Propaganda on Twitter

Farkas, Johan; Bastos, Marco

doi:10.1145/3217804.3217929

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Existent studies analyse the general behaviour in terms of online tactics of extremist organizations, compare differences in online narratives within religious extremist organizations, identify online narratives that justify violent attacks and martyrdom, and changes in those narratives over time (Caiani & Wagemann, 2009; Vergani & Bliuc, 2015). Other studies explore the behaviour of right‐wing extremist organizations regarding their online narratives and their spread via bots (Farkas & Bastos, 2018), as well as intra‐ (Caiani & Wagemann, 2009) and inter‐group dynamics. Some recent studies report the emergence of novel types of extremism (the so‐called ‘hybridized’ extremism) with a post‐organizational leaderless structure that merge various ideologies (e.g., election fraud, vaccine disinformation, conspiracy theories about global elites, and hateful and exclusionary sentiments) (Davey et al, 2021; Jones & Comerford, 2023) (Table 1).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The digital augmentation of extremism: Reviewing and guiding online extremism research from a sociotechnical perspective

Risius

Blasiak

Wibisono

et al. 2023

Information Systems Journal

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Online extremism remains a persistent problem despite the best efforts of governments, tech companies and civil society. Digital technologies can induce group polarization to promote extremism and cause substantial changes to extremism (e.g., create new forms of extremism, types of threats or radicalization approaches). Current methods to counter extremism induce undesirable side‐effects (e.g., ostracize minorities, inadvertently promote extremism) or do not leverage the full potential of digital technologies. Extremism experts recognize the need for researchers from other disciplines, like information systems, to contribute their technical expertise for understanding and countering online extremism. This article aims to introduce the field of information systems to the issue of online extremism. Information systems scholars address technology‐related societal issues from a sociotechnical perspective. The sociotechnical perspective describes systems through a series of interactions between social (structure, people) and technical components (physical system, task). We apply the sociotechnical perspective to (1) summarize the current state‐of‐the‐art knowledge of 222 articles in a systematic multi‐disciplinary literature review and (2) propose specific research questions that address two questions (How do digital technologies augment extremism? How can we successfully counter online extremism?).

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The digital augmentation of extremism: Reviewing and guiding online extremism research from a sociotechnical perspective

Risius

Blasiak

Wibisono

et al. 2023

Information Systems Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Informed by previous research that identified IRA propaganda targets (Bastos and Farkas, 2019; Farkas and Bastos, 2018), we applied regular expression to profile descriptions and sampled five distinct groups: Muscovites, Black Lives Matter activists, Conservatives, Trump supporters, and Christians. We identified Russian accounts distributing domestic, white propaganda by querying the database for users that self-reported “Москва” as their location ( n = 206).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda

Bastos

Mercea

Goveia

2021

New Media & Society

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This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identity and heroic masculinity. The results show that the visual frames employed by the Internet Research Agency are designed to embody the vox populi with relatable, familiar, or attractive faces of ordinary people. The results also indicate that Internet Research Agency influence operations displayed cultural acuity and familiarity with the social identity of their targets, and that the visual narrative the agency crafted trafficked primarily in the tropes of regular guys or attractive young women. We discuss these findings and argue that state-sponsored propaganda has attuned to subcultural and visual affordances of social platforms.

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“…Whilst much attention has been directed towards Facebook, and the study of the election-related stories most engaged with on that platform, Twitter is often used as the preferred data source, given dedicated data sets (made available by Twitter or academic researchers) of accounts run by the Internet Research Agency (Farkas and Bastos, 2018). There is a series of studies that rely on Twitter's curated sets as well as on the data robustly collected and shared among data researchers, such as by Clemson University and FiveThirtyEight, mentioned above.…”

Section: Junk News Studies: Digital Methods and Data Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of social media manipulation

Rogers

Niederer

2020

The Politics of Social Media Manipulation

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This chapter gives an overview of the contemporary scholarship surrounding ‘fake news’. It discusses how the term has been deployed politically as a barb against the free press when publishing inconvenient truths since the mid-nineteenth century. It also addresses how such notions have been used in reaction to novel publishing practices, including to the current social media platforms. More generally, the scholarship could be divided into waves, whereby the first related to the definitional issues and the production side, whilst the second has been concerned with its consumption, including the question of persuasion. There is additionally interest in solutions, including the critique of the idea that automation effectively addresses the problems. It concludes with research strategies for the study of the pervasiveness of problematic information across the internet.

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IRA Propaganda on Twitter

Cited by 18 publications

References 8 publications

The digital augmentation of extremism: Reviewing and guiding online extremism research from a sociotechnical perspective

The digital augmentation of extremism: Reviewing and guiding online extremism research from a sociotechnical perspective

Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda

The politics of social media manipulation

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