Computational Propaganda Research Articles

Characterizing Arabic Computational Propaganda on Twitter

Characterizing Arabic Computational Propaganda on Twitter

The Taliban Are Coming! How Intra-Oligarchic Conflict Proliferates Computational Propaganda in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This study examines online propaganda against fifty-seven former employees of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). This propaganda, which centered on false allegations that these employees were radical Muslims similar to the Taliban, was used as a pretext to fire them after they had failed a controversial compulsory civics test. Using Gramscian concepts of civil society and the political economy of communication, this study argues that the rise of computational propaganda in Indonesia reflects fundamental conflicts over state power and economic resources within the spheres of civil and political society. The campaign to portray KPK employees as Taliban members was the digital corollary of a political struggle among oligarchic elites over control of the anti-corruption agency as an instrument to advance their political aims. This article showcases how intra-oligarchic struggles have shaped the formation of public opinion about the KPK, a key aspect of reform, and examines their longstanding attempt to enforce oligarchic hegemony. It challenges existing studies on computational propaganda that foreground the nature of the state, or regime type, and the state’s adaptability to information technology.

The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine

TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, videos under the hashtag #Ukraine garnered 36.9 billion views, with individual videos scaling up to 88 million views. Beyond the traditional methods of spreading misleading information through images and text, the medium of sound has emerged as a novel, platform-specific audiovisual technique. Our analysis distinguishes various war-related sounds utilized by both Ukraine and Russia and classifies them into a mis- and disinformation typology. We use computational propaganda features—automation, scalability, and anonymity—to explore how TikTok’s auditory practices are exploited to exacerbate information disorders in the context of ongoing war events. These practices include reusing sounds for coordinated campaigns, creating audio meme templates for rapid amplification and distribution, and deleting the original sounds to conceal the orchestrators’ identities. We conclude that TikTok’s recommendation system (the “for you” page) acts as a sound space where exposure is strategically navigated through users’ intervention, enabling semi-automated “soft” propaganda to thrive by leveraging its audio features.

Digital propaganda is not simply propaganda in digital garb: toward an expanded theory of propaganda

Abstract Drawing on a critical review of the existing literature on computational propaganda and disinformation, and employing a three-stage process—addressing the “New Wine in Old Bottles” problem, extracting foundational concepts, and constructing a four-pillar framework—this article proposes an expanded theory of propaganda. The theory posits that digital propaganda is shaped by four key dimensions: politico-economic, sociocultural, technological, and socio-psychological, further delineated by the forces of commodification, privatization, connectivity, and virality. Broadening the analytical scope, it encompasses intricate interactions among politics, content, actors, platforms, and goals, recognizing the dynamic complexities inherent in the digital landscape. Furthermore, it sheds light on how commercial interests impact the production and dissemination of propaganda, offering insights into the propagation of popular ideologies such as patriotism and populism. This advances the understanding of digital propaganda’s pervasive impact on political discourse and societal attitudes, encouraging broader global research beyond a focus on state actors.

Munir: Weakly Supervised Transformer for Arabic Computational Propaganda Detection on Social Media

The intentional manipulation of public opinion has become prevalent in the realm of computational propaganda. The swift spread of misinformation through social networking sites poses significant challenges for governments and society, impacting various aspects of human life. Arab countries are considered among the most affected countries. Accurately identifying and countering computational propaganda is crucial, especially given the impracticality of manually annotating large volumes of social media-generated data. Moreover, the constant propagandists' evolving tactics pose a challenge to accounting models, making the immediate preparation of responsive training data difficult. To address this issue, this research proposes a novel weakly supervised learning approach, leveraging programmatic labeling to label training data in a systematic and timely manner. New labeling functions (LFs) are introduced, where experts' heuristics, knowledge, new proposed lexicons, different fine-tuned pre-trained models are turned into rules to label the data. Leveraging these LFs, we fine-tune a deep learning model for computational propaganda detection. The proposed model achieves a remarkable 94% accuracy and 86% precision in the minority class, outperforming a fine-tuned, fully supervised deep learning model. This research contributes a substantial dataset, a robust weakly supervised model, and lexicons, offering valuable tools for combating computational propaganda on Arabic social media. The code and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Bmalmotairy/Arabic-Propaganda-Detection.

Role of social bots in the Brazilian environmental debate:

This paper examines the use of computational propaganda in the Brazilian environmental debate, focusing on the 2020 Amazon Forest fire discussions on Twitter. Through the use of a bot detector algorithm and social network analysis, the research aims to understand the role of social bots and the extent to which automated accounts reverberate certain ideological positions. The study found that Twitter discussions were highly polarized between supporters and critics of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. While the participation of international celebrities in the debate increased the visibility of a civil society awareness campaign against the forest fires, it also triggered a computational propaganda counterattack by Bolsonaro’s supporters. Our analysis indicates that the anti-environmentalist reaction aimed at denying the existence of an environmental problem in the Brazilian Amazon was heavily amplified by automated and inauthentic accounts.

On the robustness of democratic electoral processes to computational propaganda

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes against external influences. Particularly interesting is to identify the social characteristics of a voter population that renders it more resilient against opinion manipulation. Equally important is to determine which of the existing democratic electoral systems is more robust to external influences. Here we construct a mathematical electoral model to address these two questions. We find that, not unexpectedly, biased electorates with clear-cut elections are overall quite resilient against opinion manipulations, because inverting the election outcome requires to change the opinion of many voters. More interesting are unbiased or weakly biased electorates with close elections. We find that such populations are more resilient against opinion manipulations (i) if they are less polarized and (ii) when voters interact more with each other, regardless of their opinion differences, and that (iii) electoral systems based on proportional representation are generally the most robust. Our model qualitatively captures the volatility of the US House of Representatives elections. We take this as a solid validation of our approach.

WARTOK: NETWORKED SOUNDSCAPES OF MEMETIC WARFARE

This panel investigates the networked soundscapes of memetic warfare on TikTok, a platform crucial in mediating the ongoing war in Ukraine since February 2022. Introduced to the public as a unique form of war programming during the first week of Russia's full-scale military invasion (Mobilio 2022), WarTok—a portmanteau of ‘TikTok’ and ‘war’—signifies "the war of super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones" (Friedmann 2022). Producing headlines such as "TikTok's Amazing Russian-Ukraine War Videos," (Figure 1) the term necessitates critical and ethical scrutiny, not only for its sensationalist stance but also for the collapse of contexts it entails. Integrated into a platform that thrives on remixing, WarTok seamlessly intertwines on-the-ground war reporting with war propaganda—an aspect explored across all panel contributions through the lens of music. Networked Soundscapes The choice for sound as the primary step in our exploration not only derives from the platform’s logic of content creation, it also acknowledges music’s affective impact and its historical role in propaganda (Thompson & Biddle 2013). Music on TikTok serves as both an affective mediator and a highly templatable networker. Recent studies highlight the templatability of TikTok sounds, offering insights into content creators' attention-grabbing techniques (Abidin & Kaye 2021), logics of trend dilution (Bainotti et al., 2022), issue-specific remix cultures (Primig et al. 2023), and infrastructural meme collection (Rogers & Giorgi 2023). Aural linkages between templates can intersect with other platform-native modalities of expression, producing networked soundscapes. A soundscape, as we approach it by leaning into TikTok’s logic of indexing “listed” and “original” sounds, foregrounds audio as the main memetic stratifier, opening up different paths for navigating content (Geboers et al., forthcoming). Hashtags and sounds, for example, can turn into a source of mutual amplification or may remain disengaged even when united through technical means (Pilipets 2023). Feeding into contested attentional dynamics of digital media (Boler & Davis 2021), propaganda by means of TikTok sharing takes on a new dimension in a highly contested space, which is said to “raise memes to the level of infrastructure” (Zulli & Zulli 2021). Memetic Warfare Often driven by a cynical hunt for eyeballs, memetic warfare on social media taps into humor and mockery, inviting playful participation (Divon 2022), channeling disinformation (Bösch 2023), and using agitainment to captivate publics beyond the explicitly political (Tuters and Noordenbos forthcoming). In the context of war propaganda, memes become central agents of partisan bonding through recognizable templates and inscribed in-group cues (Arkenbout & Scherz 2022). TikTok music expands the toolbox of crafting memes, opening up new venues of boundary work and populist instrumentalization (Boichak & Hoskins 2022). TikTok is renowned for its ability to implant short video earworms, perceived as stickier than complete songs (Vizcaíno-Verdú & Abidin 2022). Some attribute this phenomenon to the cognitive principle that human memory retains unfinished tasks more effectively than completed ones, generating affective tension (Carson 2022). Walter J. Ong’s “secondary orality”, a concept revived by Venturini (2022), is one way to address this tension in online spaces where written words often become spoken words and where evanescence is ingrained into the logic of engagement. Foregrounding the memetic function of TikTok, the panel sets out to explore how the ultra-nationalist landscape of Russian WarTok and the tactics of pro-Ukrainian hijacking intertwine in a complex ecology of imitation and attention hijacking. THE SOUND OF DISINFORMATION: TIKTOK, COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA AND THE INVASION OF UKRAINE Tom Divon and Marcus Bösch “ДОБРОГО ВЕЧОРА WHERE ARE YOU FROM”: MEMETIC REVERSAL, CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, AND SOUND HIJACKING Daria Delavar-Kasmai AMBIENT PROPAGANDA: THE DARK REFRAIN OF WARTOK Marc Tuters and Boris Noordenbos WHAT IF THEY ATTACK? КАТЮША AND THE COUNTERMOBILIZATION OF SOUND ON WARTOK Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers AMBIGUOUS STANCE-TAKING AND OPPOSITIONAL SOUND PUBLICS ON DOUYIN DURING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR Richard Rogers and Xiaoke Zhang

The Roles and Functions of Computational Propaganda in the International Struggle for Discursive Power: The Case of Russia in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

The fight for discursive power is an important strategic goal in today’s international competition. In the process of discursive power struggle, computational propaganda has been widely used as an emerging covert means of discursive power struggle. This paper starts from the perspective of discursive power struggle, and selects a representative typical case of Russia in the Russia-Ukraine conflict to study computational propaganda in the struggle for discursive power. This paper summarizes the conceptual mechanism of computational propaganda and its relationship with the struggle for discursive power in the light of the theory of discursive power, and focuses on the analysis of Russia’s computational propaganda practice in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the risks and dilemmas it faces.

The concept of cumulative deliberation: Linking systemic approaches to healthier normativity in assessing opinion formation in online discussions

AbstractOnline opinion formation has received much scholarly attention since the mass proliferation of social networks. Inter alia, online opinions have been viewed as a new part of public deliberation. However, the pre‐Internet era's vision on deliberation imposes extremely high demands on users as deliberators. We argue that opinion formation online neither pursues the goals nor follows the rules of institutionalized consensus‐oriented round‐table deliberative processes. Moreover, the growing academic evidence shows that opinion formation online is predominantly cumulative, not deliberative in nature. Thus, we introduce the concept of cumulative deliberation as an alternative and addition to classic institutional deliberation and argue that it describes opinion formation online more precisely. Importantly, it allows for two crucial additions to the deliberation theory, which are the use of systemic approaches to measuring and predicting public opinion and new normativity that sees a user as an initially neutral discussion unit. It also allows for healthier distinction between “natural” user communication and intentional counter‐deliberative distortions in online communication, like computational propaganda or cyberbullying. We end up with suggesting a research agenda on cumulative deliberation.

Cognitive warfare: an ethical analysis

This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles.

Correction to: Ludic cybermilitias: shadow play and computational propaganda in the Indonesian predatory state

Correction to: Ludic cybermilitias: shadow play and computational propaganda in the Indonesian predatory state

Ludic cybermilitias: shadow play and computational propaganda in the Indonesian predatory state

Abstract This article ties the studies of computational propaganda to studies of the state in the Global South by examining “political buzzers”—actors of Indonesian computational propaganda. Rather than an extension of state propaganda, I argue that buzzers are a “twilight institution” straddling the boundaries between state and society. As cybermilitias, they are rooted in the historical conjuncture of Indonesian state practices in deploying privatized violence for extractive capitalist accumulation, exhibited by two cases in this article: the reclamation of Benoa Bay in Bali and the Ciliwung forced evictions in Jakarta. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork, I delve into buzzers’ experience of computational propaganda as an avenue for political agency. They conceive their clandestine labor into a play, conjuring the political metaphor of dalang (master puppeteers) pulling strings from behind the scenes. These shadow play theatrics constitute the ludic aspect of buzzers as ludic cybermilitias. By exploring how computational propaganda is shaped by and shapes state power in Indonesia, I problematize the notion that political buzzers signify “democratic regression” or “digital authoritarianism.” Instead, I propose that buzzers represent the latest manifestation of privatized violence within the predatory logic of post-authoritarian states in the Global South.

Emotional community and concerted action: on the emotional mobilization mechanism of disinformation in the Anti-extradition Law amendment movement in Hong Kong

Abstract With the large-scale application of computational propaganda, disinformation campaigns have emerged globally in response to the logic of “post-truth” politics. Organized disinformation campaigns operate frequently on overseas social media platforms, with China often being the target. In order to understand the dissemination mechanisms of such disinformation campaigns, the study found that the dissemination of disinformation became a key strategy for the campaign’s emotional mobilization. The main subjects of disinformation have formed an international communication matrix, creating and spreading all kinds of disinformation on a large scale. The “coalition of protesters” is based on the shared emotional experience evoked by disinformation and characterized by the act of spreading disinformation. Then, the widespread dissemination of the corresponding emotions leads to different perceptions of the “target,” thus prompting protesters to adopt different types of collective action. This mechanism of emotional mobilization shows that facts are “too big to know,” which exacerbates confirmation bias and provides more space for the spread of disinformation. The strong emotions embedded in disinformation contributed to the completion of the protesters’ imagination of community, and emotions became the dominant factor in coalescing the group and providing motivational support for collective action.

Computational propaganda: Concepts, methods, and challenges

In this dialogue, Phillip Howard introduces “computational propaganda” as an emerging communication tool in political communication and a perspective for investigating misinformation and disinformation. By articulating the concepts, patterns, and mechanisms of computational propaganda, Howard proposes a socio-technical framework for studying computational propaganda. He calls for mixed methods to undertake computational research alongside qualitative investigation, thus addressing the computational as well as the political. Howard emphasizes the battle against algorithm bias, manipulation, and misinformation, and he advocates building an International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), an international scientific collaboration, to respond to the challenges. In addition, Howard offers advice on further research in computational propaganda.

The transformation of propaganda: The continuities and discontinuities of information operations, from Soviet to Russian active measures

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the transformation of Soviet Cold War propaganda into the contemporary Russian information operations, bringing together two distinct periods characterised with the rise of new and sophisticated techniques. By comparing propaganda instructions in KGB manuals and the practices of the propagandists behind the 2014–2020 Secondary Infektion campaign, we find out what of the “analogue” Cold War propaganda remains in the present-day computational propaganda and how exactly Soviet propaganda techniques evolved into the new mediascape. This highlights both strong continuities of methods and techniques and certain discontinuities. Our analysis also contributes to the understanding of the very concept of propaganda, singling out such aspects as covertness, negativity, and inauthenticity as especially ingrained features of the Russian style of propaganda that are also regrettably often overlooked in generic definitions.

Mapping the Russian Political Influence Ecosystem: The Night Wolves Biker Gang

Computational propaganda—the use of political bots and trolls for orchestrated interventions in online political discourse—is not the only means through which nefarious actors assert political influence in democracies around the world. In the context of influence operations, a significant—yet, understudied—phenomenon is the so-called “boots on the ground”—political communities with ties to state actors that aptly use digital tools to engage in framing and contestation of political events, narratives, and agendas. This article defines political micro-influencers as strategic communicative actors who perform authentic political identities with the goal of influencing public attitudes and behaviors. Situating the inquiry in the context of Russian influence operations, this article investigates the case of the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club by mapping the narratives associated with the movement and examining their structural and functional characteristics. Findings demonstrate how migrant counterpublics and historically nonconforming social groups get co-opted to propagate Russian geopolitical influence in Western democracies. On the basis of this case, the study provides guidelines and suggestions for future work on identifying political micro-influencers and tracing their narratives across the digital ecosystem.

#MahsaAmini: Iranian Twitter Activism in Times of Computational Propaganda

ABSTRACT This paper discusses 1) how #MahsaAmini has become a significant hybrid movement in Iran and 2) how it is taking Twitter activism into the post-fake news era. I will begin by reviewing the existing literature on Twitter and democracy. Then, I will discuss the roots of the #MahsaAmini, which make it a hybrid movement. Further, I will show how Iranians have circumvented the regime’s fake news campaigns and cyber army. This paper argues that while non-democratic regimes have developed more complex methods of suppressing digital protests, these efforts are ineffective in large-scale protests.

Fanbois and Fanbots: Tesla’s Entrepreneurial Narratives and Corporate Computational Propaganda on Social Media

This paper reports the discovery of a series of computational social media accounts (Fanbots) on Twitter that may have played a critical role in sustaining the entrepreneurial narratives of Tesla, the electric-vehicle maker. From 2010 to 2020—a period of trial, error, and eventual success for Tesla—these computational agents generated pro-firm tweets (Corporate Computational Propaganda, CCP), accounting for more than 10% of the total Twitter activity that included the cashtag, $TSLA, and 23% of activity that included the hashtag, #TSLA. Though similar to programmed social media content in the political sphere, the activities of these accounts predate the existence of political computational propaganda associated with foreign support for, for instance, Brexit in the United Kingdom (2016) and Donald Trump in the United States (2016). The paper (a) characterizes the extent of Fanbot content in two large Tesla tweet corpora, (b) identifies possible motivations for the creation of these accounts in relation to the firm’s entrepreneurial narratives, and (c) explores possible mechanisms by which the Fanbots might have acted. Although we are unable to directly observe the source or stated purpose of these accounts, based upon the timing of Fanbot creation and other indirect indicators, we infer that these accounts and the social media activity they generated were intended to influence social perception of Tesla. The conclusion assesses the generalizability of a Fanbot-based strategy, highlighting contextual limitations, while also pointing to ways that firms may already be using CCP to manage social approval in emerging-industry contexts.

Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media

Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media