Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and allies, against the Syria Civil Defense (a.k.a. the White Helmets). We unveil coordinated groups using automatic retweets and content duplication to promote narratives and/or accounts. The results also reveal distinct promoting strategies, ranging from the small groups sharing the exact same text repeatedly, to complex "news website factories" where dozens of accounts synchronously spread the same news from multiple sites.
@article{arxiv.2003.01313,
title = {Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation},
author = {Diogo Pacheco and Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.01313},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
To be presented at WWW 2020 Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior and forthcoming in the Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020