Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation

Abstract

Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and allies, against the Syria Civil Defense (a.k.a. the White Helmets). We unveil coordinated groups using automatic retweets and content duplication to promote narratives and/or accounts. e results also reveal distinct promoting strategies, ranging from the small groups sharing the exact same text repeatedly, to complex "news website factories" where dozens of accounts synchronously spread the same news from multiple sites.

Amplifying influence through coordinated behaviour in social networks

“…Similarly, HCCs discovered by the three community extraction methods (Table 7) exhibit large discrepancies, suggesting that whichever method is used, tuning is required to produce interpretable results. This is evident in the literature: Cao et al conducted significant pre-processing when identifying URL sharing campaigns across two years of Twitter activity (Cao et al 2015), and Pacheco et al showed how specific strategies could identify groups in the online narrative surrounding the Syrian White Helmet organisation (Pacheco et al 2020).…”

“…The approach presented can be used to perform analytics similar to the Rapid Retweet Network used by Pacheco et al (2020), who used it to expose tight clusters of bot-like accounts, which retweeted the same tweet within 10 s of it appearing. We varied this for the DS1 dataset (due to its small nature) and searched for accounts which retweeted the same tweet within 10 s, regardless of the age of the original tweet.…”

“…A third example connects accounts that use multiple hashtags in the same order in their tweets. The approach was employed searching for co-retweeting communities spreading propaganda attacking the Syrian White Helmet movement by linking accounts that retweeted tweets within 10 s Pacheco et al (2020).…”

Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes

“…The current information ecosystem and virality tools, such as bots, enable memes to spread easily, jumping from one target group to another. As of present, attempts to limit the spread of such memes have focused on analyzing social networks and looking for fake accounts and bots to reduce the spread of such content (Cresci et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2019;Chetan et al, 2019;Pacheco et al, 2020).…”

“…Propaganda appears in various forms and has been studied by different research communities. There has been work on exploring network structure, looking for malicious accounts and coordinated inauthentic behavior (Cresci et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2019;Chetan et al, 2019;Pacheco et al, 2020).…”