Related papers: Analysing Russian Trolls via NLP tools
Recent evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors to manipulate public opinion on the Web. Campaigns revolving around major political events are enacted via mission-focused "trolls." While trolls are…
One major sub-domain in the subject of polling public opinion with social media data is electoral prediction. Electoral prediction utilizing social media data potentially would significantly affect campaign strategies, complementing…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
With the rise in popularity of public social media and micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter, the people have found a venue to hear and be heard by their peers without an intermediary. As a consequence, and aided by the public…
In recent times, social media sites such as Twitter have been extensively used for debating politics and public policies. These debates span millions of tweets and numerous topics of public importance. Thus, it is imperative that this vast…
On February 7, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a two-hour interview with conservative political commentator, Tucker Carlson. This study investigated the impact of the Carlson- Putin interview on the US X audience. We proposed a…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
The detection of state-sponsored trolls operating in influence campaigns on social media is a critical and unsolved challenge for the research community, which has significant implications beyond the online realm. To address this challenge,…
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 2016 U.S. presidential election has witnessed the major role of Twitter in the year's most important political event. Candidates used this social media platform extensively for online campaigns. Meanwhile, social media has been filled…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public…
Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets,…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
Online social media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
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…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
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…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…