{"133891":{"#nid":"133891","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Four Telltale Signs of Propaganda on Twitter","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EAs Election Day 2012 draws nearer, the \u201cTwitterverse\u201d promises to light up again and again with explosions of political opinion. But which tweets are the genuinely expressed feelings of individual users and which are systematic disseminations of information meant to support or discredit an idea\u2014the textbook definition of propaganda?\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EA new study out of the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science calls such patterns of communication \u201chyperadvocacy.\u201d The study identifies four characteristic behaviors of Twitter hyperadvocates, whose actions clearly separate them from the tweeting behavior of typical users. \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.scs.gatech.edu\/people\/nick-feamster\u0022\u003EAssociate Professor Nick Feamster\u003C\/a\u003E directed the study, working with former postdoctoral researcher \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.cs.umd.edu\/%7Elume\/\u0022\u003ECristian Lumezanu\u003C\/a\u003E and \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.prism.gatech.edu\/%7Ehk28\/\u0022\u003EAssociate Professor Hans Klein\u003C\/a\u003E of Georgia Tech\u2019s School of Public Policy.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EThe study examined tweets from two recent politically charged U.S. events: the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Nevada and the 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Collecting tweets that used the hashtags #nvsen and #debtceiling, the researchers were able to gather approximately 80 percent of all tweets on those issues during the time frame under study. From a dataset of nearly 100,000 tweets for the two issues combined, Feamster and his colleagues identified the following behaviors that characterize propagandistic activities on Twitter by users on both sides of the partisan aisle:\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Col\u003E\u003Cli\u003ESending high volumes of tweets over short periods of time;\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003ERetweeting while publishing little original content;\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003EQuickly retweeting others\u2019 content; and\u003C\/li\u003E\u003Cli\u003ECoordinating with other, seemingly unrelated users to send duplicate or near-duplicate messages on the same topic simultaneously.\u003C\/li\u003E\u003C\/ol\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003E\u201cAs social media become more and more ingrained in our culture, and as people use social media more as a source of information about the world, it\u2019s important to know the provenance of that information\u2014where it\u2019s coming from and whether it can be trusted,\u201d Feamster said. \u201cAs a user, you might think the information you see is coming from lots of different sources, but in fact it can be part of an orchestrated campaign.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EIndeed, the very aspect of Twitter that makes it appear less amenable to traditional propaganda also makes it difficult to address with traditional content analysis techniques. Historically researchers could sift through the content of major media vehicles (The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, for instance) looking for \u201cextreme\u201d language, but such methods are often rendered meaningless in the world of social media where the huge number of users makes it nearly impossible to identify a baseline \u201cstandard\u201d language.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003E\u201cTwitter is a sort of \u2018extreme democracy\u2019\u2013 everyone\u2019s a publisher, and people can say whatever they want with no rejection or limit. It\u2019s complete freedom of expression,\u201d said Lumezanu, now a researcher at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, N.J. \u201cWe had to come up with a way to identify hyperadvocate behavior that didn\u2019t try to politically valuate content, because in Twitter the content often can be misleading.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003ERather than identify propaganda-like communication by focusing on content, Lumezanu proposed examining \u003Cem\u003Ebehavior\u003C\/em\u003E instead. The term \u201chyperadvocacy\u201d is politically neutral and refers simply to those users and content that are consistently biased toward a specific point of view, without necessarily having a malicious or subversive intent. Starting with the tweets from users whose political stance was clearly known (such as public figures), the researchers used existing algorithms that rely on examining retweeting patterns to determine clusters of users with similar political ideologies. Then they identified as hyperadvocates those users who retweeted predominantly messages of users in the same cluster. These users consistently demonstrated the four characteristic behaviors described above.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EIn short, the study provides solid preliminary evidence in social media for the kind of message influencing that has long been known to exist within traditional media. Some messages were repeatedly retweeted, creating an echo chamber effect that increased the perceived legitimacy of the positions advocated in those tweets. Researchers also found some differences in tweeting behavior between the two issues under study. For example, the Nevada Senate race had a smaller number of individual tweeters but a relatively larger number of high-volume tweeters, whereas hyperadvocacy in the debt-ceiling debate was effected through more widespread retweeting of low-volume users.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003E\u201cWe rely on media to serve as our window on the world, but media can also distort what we see. It can act as a lens or as a filter, enlarging some topics and minimizing others,\u201d said Klein, who directs the \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.ip3.gatech.edu\/\u0022\u003EInternet and Public Policy Project\u003C\/a\u003E at Georgia Tech. \u201cSuch media effects have long been studied in the mass media. This research looks for similar propaganda-like effects in new media like Twitter.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EThe study is described in the paper \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.cs.umd.edu\/%7Elume\/files\/icwsm12.pdf\u0022\u003E\u201c#bias: Measuring the Tweeting Behavior of Propagandists,\u201d\u003C\/a\u003E which Lumezanu will present at the \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.icwsm.org\/2012\/index.php\u0022\u003E6\u003Csup\u003Eth\u003C\/sup\u003E International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media\u003C\/a\u003E (ICWSM \u201912), to be held June 4-6 at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Georgia Tech study profiles behavior of social media \u2018hyperadvocacy\u2019"}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EA new study out of the School of Computer Science looks at \u201chyperadvocacy\u201d on Twitter. The study identifies four characteristic behaviors of hyperadvocates, whose actions clearly separate them from the tweeting behavior of typical users.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"The study identifies four characteristic behaviors of Twitter hyperadvocates, whose actions clearly separate them from the tweeting behavior of typical users."}],"uid":"27560","created_gmt":"2012-06-04 15:10:31","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:12:22","author":"Jason Maderer","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2012-05-31T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2012-05-31T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"65060":{"id":"65060","type":"image","title":"Nick Feamster","body":null,"created":"1449176783","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:06:23","changed":"1475894574","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:42:54","alt":"Nick Feamster","file":{"fid":"192154","name":"091201R005.JPG","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/091201R005_0.JPG","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/091201R005_0.JPG","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":3621651,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/091201R005_0.JPG?itok=qdY8dcb3"}}},"media_ids":["65060"],"groups":[{"id":"1183","name":"Home"}],"categories":[{"id":"153","name":"Computer Science\/Information Technology and Security"},{"id":"135","name":"Research"}],"keywords":[{"id":"11516","name":"Hans Klein"},{"id":"10637","name":"nick feamster"},{"id":"314","name":"twitter"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp class=\u0022Body1\u0022\u003EMichael Terrazas\u003Cbr \/\u003EAssistant Director of Communications\u003Cbr \/\u003ECollege of Computing\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:mterraza@cc.gatech.edu\u0022\u003E\u003Cbr class=\u0022Body1\u0022 \/\u003Emterraza@cc.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E404-245-0707\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["mterraza@cc.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}