Propaganda analysis in social media: a bibliometric review

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to examine the trends in research studies in the past decade which address the use and analysis of propaganda in social media using natural language processing. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review of studies focusing on the use, identification and analysis of propaganda in social media. Design/methodology/approach This work investigates and examines the research papers acquired from the Scopus database which has huge number of peer reviewed literature and also provides interfaces to access required for bibliometric study. This paper has covered subject papers from 2010 to early 2020 and using tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny. Findings This bibliometric survey shows that propaganda in social media is more studied in the area of social sciences, and the field of computer science is catching up. The evolution of research for propaganda in social media shows positive trends. This subject is primarily rooted in the social sciences. Also this subject has shown a recent shift in the area of computer science. The keyword analysis shows that the propaganda in social media is being studied in conjunction with issues such as fake news, political astroturfing, terrorism and radicalization. Research limitations/implications The lack of highly cited papers and co-citation analysis implies intermittent contributions by the researchers. Propaganda in social media is becoming a global phenomenon, and ill effects of this are evident in developing countries as well. This denotes a great deal of scope of work for researchers in other countries focusing on their territorial issues. This study was conducted in the confines of data captured from the Scopus database. Hence, it should be noted that some vital publications in recent times could not be included in this study. Originality/value The uniqueness of this work is that a thorough bibliometric analysis of the topic is demonstrated using several forms such as mind map, co-occurrence, co-citations, Sankey plot and topic dendrograms by using bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny.

H-Prop and H-Prop-News: Computational Propaganda Datasets in Hindi

“…Today, abundant online news media has cropped up, some with the intent of spreading propaganda. The spectrum of a news article can range from neutral to biased [10]. Even though every news outlet/agency claims to be fair and unbiased, the personal stand of the article author and the news outlet may influence the reporting style and intent to some extent [11].…”

Learning from Each Other—A Bibliometric Review of Research on Information Disorders

“…Other authors made bibliometric reviews in conjunction with information disorders on topics such as propaganda or rumor. For example, the study of Chaudhari and Pawar [32] analyzed propaganda in social media and offered evidence that it was related with fake news, political astroturfing, terrorism or radicalization. Similar findings were reported earlier by Tal and Gordon [33] who argued that, although propaganda plays a very important role in our lives, it cannot be considered an autonomous field of research.…”

“…We also encounter topics about "computational propaganda" used as a tool for controlling information, weaponization of information and social media, COVID-19 as a political weapon [62] and misinformation in the post-truth era as part of the hybrid arsenal of authoritarian states for which social media has become an associated working tool [32,33,79]. Other issues address authoritarian states such as Iran, some states in the Middle East, or less developed, more politically and economically fragile countries (e.g., Malaysia, Indonesia) where human rights are violated, and which have found an opportunity to carry out social media and social networks campaigns to promote their regimes and silence their dissidents [56].…”

Visual analysis of global research trends in social bots based on bibliometrics

“…This calls for review articles to show an overview of the work flow, highlight the findings of research and find the existing gaps in social bots. Some researchers have responded to this call, and few review articles were published (Chaudhari and Pawar, 2021; Cresci, 2020; Orabi et al , 2020; Karata and Ahin, 2017), which can be an important reference for subsequent scholars to carry out research on social bots. However, these reviews are all for the detection methods and techniques of social bots.…”