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Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
The fifty-eighth American presidential election in 2016 still arouse fierce controversyat present. A portion of politicians as well as medium and voters believe that theRussian government interfered with the election of 2016 by controlling…
There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls". In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models…
The Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out a broad information campaign in the U.S. before and after the 2016 presidential election. The organization created an expansive set of internet properties: web domains, Facebook…
Social media platforms have been exploited to conduct election interference in recent years. In particular, the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been identified as a key source of misinformation spread on Twitter prior to…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election, spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…
Since the 2016 US Presidential election, social media abuse has been eliciting massive concern in the academic community and beyond. Preventing and limiting the malicious activity of users, such as trolls and bots, in their manipulation…
In a review into automated and malicious activity Twitter released a list of accounts that they believed were connected to state sponsored manipulation of the 2016 American Election. This list details 2,752 accounts Twitter believed to be…
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…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by practices of information warfare, yet existing evidence is largely anecdotal while large-scale empirical evidence is lacking. Here, we analyze the spread of pro-Russian…
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing…
State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion. Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they control,…
For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the…
Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…
Russian Internet Trolls use fake personas to spread disinformation through multiple social media streams. Given the increased frequency of this threat across social media platforms, understanding those operations is paramount in combating…
We developed and used a collection of statistical methods (unsupervised machine learning) to extract relevant information from a Twitter supplied data set consisting of alleged Russian trolls who (allegedly) attempted to influence the 2016…