TY - GEN
T1 - Social cyber forensics approach to study twitter’s and blogs’ influence on propaganda campaigns
AU - Al-Khateeb, Samer
AU - Hussain, Muhammad Nihal
AU - Agarwal, Nitin
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is funded in part by NSF (IIS-1636933, IIS-1110868 and ACI-1429160), ONR (N000141010091, N000141410489, N0001415P1187, N000141612016, and N000141612412), AFRL, ARO (W911NF-16-1-0189), DARPA (W31P4Q-17-C-0059), and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Fund at UA Little Rock.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - In today’s information technology age our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. Online Deviant Groups (ODGs) use social media to coordinate cyber propaganda campaigns to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors. In this research, we study the ODGs who conducted cyber propaganda campaigns against NATO’s Trident Juncture Exercise 2015 (TRJE 2015) and how they used Twitter and blogs to drive the campaigns. Using a blended Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Social Cyber Forensics (SCF) approaches, “anti-NATO” narratives were identified on blogs. The narratives intensified as the TRJE 2015 approached. The most influential narrative identified by the proposed methodology called for civil disobedience and direct actions against TRJE 2015 specifically and NATO in general. We use SCF analysis to extract metadata associated with propaganda-riddled websites. The metadata helps in the collection of social and communication network information. By applying SNA on the data, we identify influential users and powerful groups (or, focal structures) coordinating the propaganda campaigns. Data for this research (including blogs and metadata) is accessible through our in-house developed Blogtrackers tool.
AB - In today’s information technology age our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. Online Deviant Groups (ODGs) use social media to coordinate cyber propaganda campaigns to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors. In this research, we study the ODGs who conducted cyber propaganda campaigns against NATO’s Trident Juncture Exercise 2015 (TRJE 2015) and how they used Twitter and blogs to drive the campaigns. Using a blended Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Social Cyber Forensics (SCF) approaches, “anti-NATO” narratives were identified on blogs. The narratives intensified as the TRJE 2015 approached. The most influential narrative identified by the proposed methodology called for civil disobedience and direct actions against TRJE 2015 specifically and NATO in general. We use SCF analysis to extract metadata associated with propaganda-riddled websites. The metadata helps in the collection of social and communication network information. By applying SNA on the data, we identify influential users and powerful groups (or, focal structures) coordinating the propaganda campaigns. Data for this research (including blogs and metadata) is accessible through our in-house developed Blogtrackers tool.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-60240-0_13
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-60240-0_13
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85022321056
SN - 9783319602394
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 108
EP - 113
BT - Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling - 10th International Conference, SBP-BRiMS 2017, Proceedings
A2 - Osgood, Nathaniel
A2 - Lee, Dongwon
A2 - Thomson, Robert
A2 - Lin, Yu-Ru
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 10th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling, SBP-BRiMS 2017
Y2 - 5 July 2017 through 8 July 2017
ER -