TY - CONF
T1 - Examining strategic integration of social media platforms in tracking disinformation campaign coordination
AU - Hussain, Muhammad Nihal
AU - Bandeli, Kiran Kumar
AU - Al-Khateeb, Samer
AU - Tokdemir, Serpil
AU - Agarwal, Nitin
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (IIS-1636933, ACI-1429160, and IIS-1110868), U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-10-1-0091, N00014-14-1-0489, N00014-15-P-1187, N00014-16-1-2016, N00014-16-1-2412, N00014-17-1-2605, N00014-17-1-2675), U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-16-1-0189), U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W31P4Q-17-C-0059) and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Endowment at the University of Arkansas at Little Roc. Anky opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. The resarcheers gratefully acknowledge the support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Curran Associates Inc.. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Social media is a widely used communication platform that affords easier sharing and access to information.Although social media is used for benign purposes, a few use this platform for deviant activities such ascyberbullying, cyber warfare or propaganda, disinformation and fake news dissemination to influence the masses.With the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools like social media, disseminatinghoax, false information, and propaganda is both convenient and effective. Social media in general and blogs inparticular act as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. In order to generate discourse, web traffic needs tobe driven to these virtual spaces. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and other websites aretherefore used as vehicles to disseminate the content. This link between blogs and social media platforms is vitalto examine disinformation campaigns. In this research, we examine the role of media orchestration strategies,more specifically, cross-media and mix-media strategies in conducting disinformation campaigns. The researchpresents in-depth examination of the information networks using social network analysis and cyber forensic-basedmethodology, to identify prominent information actors and leading coordinators of the disinformation campaigns.Using the developed research methodology, the study reveals a massive disinformation coordination campaignpertaining to the Baltic region conducted primarily on blogs but strategically linking to a variety of other socialmedia platforms, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, VKontakte, among others.
AB - Social media is a widely used communication platform that affords easier sharing and access to information.Although social media is used for benign purposes, a few use this platform for deviant activities such ascyberbullying, cyber warfare or propaganda, disinformation and fake news dissemination to influence the masses.With the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools like social media, disseminatinghoax, false information, and propaganda is both convenient and effective. Social media in general and blogs inparticular act as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. In order to generate discourse, web traffic needs tobe driven to these virtual spaces. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and other websites aretherefore used as vehicles to disseminate the content. This link between blogs and social media platforms is vitalto examine disinformation campaigns. In this research, we examine the role of media orchestration strategies,more specifically, cross-media and mix-media strategies in conducting disinformation campaigns. The researchpresents in-depth examination of the information networks using social network analysis and cyber forensic-basedmethodology, to identify prominent information actors and leading coordinators of the disinformation campaigns.Using the developed research methodology, the study reveals a massive disinformation coordination campaignpertaining to the Baltic region conducted primarily on blogs but strategically linking to a variety of other socialmedia platforms, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, VKontakte, among others.
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M3 - Paper
AN - SCOPUS:85084096896
T2 - 2018 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, BRiMS 2018
Y2 - 10 July 2018 through 13 July 2018
ER -