The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media
This work addresses the issue of online manipulation for social media platforms and policymakers, but it is incremental as it combines existing characteristics rather than introducing a new paradigm.
The study tackled the problem of analyzing propaganda spread and coordinated behavior on social media by proposing metrics and applying them to a Twitter dataset from the 2019 UK general election, revealing insights into community authenticity and harmfulness through comparisons with bot scores and suspensions.
Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of propaganda to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and to amplify its impact. Despite the connection between them, these two characteristics have so far been considered in isolation. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we analyze the spread of propaganda and its interplay with coordinated behavior on a large Twitter dataset about the 2019 UK general election. We first propose and evaluate several metrics for measuring the use of propaganda on Twitter. Then, we investigate the use of propaganda by different coordinated communities that participated in the online debate. The combination of the use of propaganda and coordinated behavior allows us to uncover the authenticity and harmfulness of the different communities. Finally, we compare our measures of propaganda and coordination with automation (i.e., bot) scores and Twitter suspensions, revealing interesting trends. From a theoretical viewpoint, we introduce a methodology for analyzing several important dimensions of online behavior that are seldom conjointly considered. From a practical viewpoint, we provide new insights into authentic and inauthentic online activities during the 2019 UK general election.