14.9SIJun 12
Climate Policy Elites' Twitter Interactions across Nine CountriesTed Hsuan Yun Chen, Arttu Malkamäki, Ali Faqeeh et al.
Social media is an important space for interactions between climate policy actors, with a burgeoning literature recognizing them as critical platforms of political contestation. We identified Twitter accounts associated with 904 climate change policy actors across nine countries, and collected their activities from 2017--2022, totalling 40 million activities from 16,086 accounts at different organizational levels. We studied these actors and their interactions as a polycentric governance system, emphasizing how boundary blurring between the public and private on social media platforms uniquely shapes the online policy process. Initial results show there is considerable temporal and cross-national variation in how prominent climate-related activities were, but all national policy systems generally responded to climate-related events, such as climate protests, in a similar manner. Examining patterns of interaction within and across countries, we find that these national policy systems rarely directly interact with one another, but are connected through consistently engaging with the same content produced by accounts of international organizations, climate activists, and researchers.
7.4SIMar 26
Beyond Disinformation: Strategic Misrepresentation across Content, Actors, Processes, and CovertnessArttu Malkamäki, Daniel Balinhas, Letizia Iannucci et al.
This article revisits the widely studied problem of disinformation and related phenomena in online social networks (OSNs) by reframing it as a broader problem of misrepresentation. While disinformation is commonly understood as the intentional spread of false content, its meaning is applied inconsistently and often remains narrowly content-focused. This obscures other forms of manipulation, such as coordinated behavior that distorts the visibility, popularity or perceived legitimacy of actors and discourses without altering content itself. We argue that such limitations hinder a coherent and operational understanding of information campaigning in OSNs. To address this, we introduce strategic misrepresentation as a unifying concept capturing the interplay between content, actors and processes in shaping collective sensemaking. We formalize this concept through a four-dimensional framework encompassing content distortion, actor distortion, process distortion and covertness, reflecting how information campaigns unfold in practice and emphasizing observable behavioral signals. Building on this conceptualization, we conduct an integrative survey of state-of-the-art detection techniques across machine learning, network science and visual analytics. By synthesizing these approaches, we demonstrate how they jointly operationalize strategic misrepresentation in a data-driven manner. Our work provides a novel pragmatic foundation for detecting, classifying, and evaluating legitimate and illegitimate information campaigns within and across OSNs.