Coordinating Narratives and the Capitol Riots on Parler
This addresses the issue of online disinformation leading to offline violence for social media platforms and policymakers, though it is incremental as it applies an existing network analysis approach to a new dataset.
The study tackled the problem of detecting coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media by analyzing user posts on Parler, resulting in the identification of coordinated user clusters that posted similar content supporting election-related narratives during the Capitol riots.
Coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to influence social media users, potentially leading to offline violence. In this study, we introduce a general methodology to uncover coordinated messaging through analysis of user parleys on Parler. The proposed method constructs a user-to-user coordination network graph induced by a user-to-text graph and a text-to-text similarity graph. The text-to-text graph is constructed based on the textual similarity of Parler posts. We study three influential groups of users in the 6 January 2020 Capitol riots and detect networks of coordinated user clusters that are all posting similar textual content in support of different disinformation narratives related to the U.S. 2020 elections.