Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere
Abstract
We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.07276,
title = {Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere},
author = {Kareem Darwish and Dimitar Alexandrov and Preslav Nakov and Yelena Mejova},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07276},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
to appear in SocInfo 2017