论文标题
俄罗斯巨魔讲俄语:区域Twitter操作和MH17
Russian trolls speaking Russian: Regional Twitter operations and MH17
论文作者
论文摘要
社交媒体在促进媒体多元化中的作用最初被视为完全积极。但是,据称,一些政府通过雇用在线评论员(也称为巨魔)来传播宣传和虚假信息,从而操纵社交媒体。特别是,俄罗斯存在着一种涉嫌在国内和国际上运营的专业巨魔系统。 2018年,Twitter发布了有关俄罗斯巨魔的帐户的数据,开始了一波研究。但是,尽管这些巨魔的外国语英语操作受到了极大的关注,但没有研究分析其俄罗斯语言国内和区域性的活动。我们通过描述俄罗斯巨魔的俄罗斯语言行动来解决这一差距。我们首先进行描述性分析,然后专注于与马来西亚航空公司MH17撞车相关的巨魔操作。 除其他外,我们发现俄罗斯语言巨魔已经开展了163个主题标签广告系列(HashTag使用在一个月内突然增长)。此类运动的主要政治情感是赞美俄罗斯和普京(29%),批评乌克兰(26%),并批评美国和奥巴马(9%)。此外,巨魔积极地重新保存信息,有76%的推文转发或包含URL。此外,我们观察到推文的周期性时间模式,表明巨魔使用自动化工具。此外,我们发现有关MH17崩溃的巨魔信息活动在推文数方面是最大的。但是,大约有68%的带有MH17主题标签的推文可能仅用于主题标签放大。由于排除了这些推文,建议乌克兰造成撞车的推文中约有49%的推文,只有13%的推文占据了新闻,只有13%的推文包含虚假信息和宣传。有趣的是,巨魔促进了坠机的不一致的替代理论。
The role of social media in promoting media pluralism was initially viewed as wholly positive. However, some governments are allegedly manipulating social media by hiring online commentators (also known as trolls) to spread propaganda and disinformation. In particular, an alleged system of professional trolls operating both domestically and internationally exists in Russia. In 2018, Twitter released data on accounts identified as Russian trolls, starting a wave of research. However, while foreign-targeted English language operations of these trolls have received significant attention, no research has analyzed their Russian language domestic and regional-targeted activities. We address this gap by characterizing the Russian-language operations of Russian trolls. We first perform a descriptive analysis, and then focus in on the trolls' operation related to the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Among other things, we find that Russian-language trolls have run 163 hashtag campaigns (where hashtag use grows abruptly within a month). The main political sentiments of such campaigns were praising Russia and Putin (29%), criticizing Ukraine (26%), and criticizing the United States and Obama (9%). Further, trolls actively reshared information with 76% of tweets being retweets or containing a URL. Additionally, we observe periodic temporal patterns of tweeting suggesting that trolls use automation tools. Further, we find that trolls' information campaign on the MH17 crash was the largest in terms of tweet count. However, around 68% of tweets posted with MH17 hashtags were likely used simply for hashtag amplification. With these tweets excluded, about 49% of the tweets suggested to varying levels that Ukraine was responsible for the crash, and only 13% contained disinformation and propaganda presented as news. Interestingly, trolls promoted inconsistent alternative theories for the crash.