Studying the Weaponization of Social Media: Case Studies of Anti-NATO Disinformation Campaigns

Abstract

Social media provides a fertile ground for any user to find or share information about various events with others. At the same time, social media is not always used for benign purposes. With the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools, disseminating false information and propaganda is both convenient and effective. In this research, we studied Online Deviant Groups (ODGs) that conduct cyber propaganda campaigns in order to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors or perspectives about an event. We provide case studies in which various disinformation and propaganda swamped social media during two NATO exercises in 2015. We demonstrate ODGs’ capability to spread anti-NATO propaganda using a highly sophisticated and well-coordinated social media campaign. In particular, blogs were used as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. And, to generate discourse, web traffic was driven to these virtual spaces via other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and VKontakte. By further examining the information flows within the social media networks, we identify sources of mis/disinformation and their reach, i.e., how far and how quickly the mis/disinformation could travel and consequently detect manipulation. The chapter presents an in-depth examination of the information networks using social network analysis (SNA) and social cyber forensics (SCF) based methodologies to identify prominent information brokers, leading coordinators, and information competitors who seek to further their own agenda. Through SCF tools, e.g., Maltego, we extract metadata associated with disinformation-riddled websites. The extracted metadata helps in uncovering the implicit relations among various ODGs. We further collected the social network of various ODGs (i.e., their friends and followers) and their communication network (i.e., network depicting the flow of information such as tweets, retweets, mentions, and hyperlinks). SNA helped us identify influential users and powerful groups responsible for coordinating the various disinformation campaigns. One of the key research findings is the vitality of the link between blogs and other social media platforms to examine disinformation campaigns.