Online Propaganda Research Articles

The Demonization of Islam through Social Media: A Case Study of #Stopislam in Instagram

This article studies the process of demonization, its consequences, and how social media contribute to the formalization of its axiology. The demonization of societies aims to create social subjects that fit into the idea of the “other” by exposing them to compulsory invisibility. This research’s main objective was to examine how demonization is used as a weapon of oppression to devalue specific individuals through the hashtag #StopIslam and Instagram’s role in this process. The methodology used for this purpose has consisted of an empirical and quantitative analysis of the most recent (1 January 2020–31 July 2020) posts on Instagram with #StopIslam, analyzing the images and the content. The study has determined how, through social media manipulation, erroneous ideas are transmitted that prevent the Islamic collective’s integration, especially in European countries. The conclusions will reflect hate speech and how the Islamic world’s demonization results in the Muslim community’s stigmatization, racism, and Islamophobia. Although there are different articles related to demonization and hate speech, there are not many scientific resources that explain these variables on Instagram and how it affects the inclusion of the Muslim community in Europe, significantly when the time spent on the Internet is growing.

Social Media Manipulation, Autonomy and Capabilities

To understand why social media platforms’ potency as a tool for manipulation is inadequately apprehended through content-neutral, autonomy-focused analyses, this paper starts with an overview of the structural conditions that allowed such platforms to acquire their considerable regulatory power. Among these conditions, two elements stand out: the hidden -rather than non-deliberative- influence as well as its precise and comprehensive scope. While the hidden influence is what sets social media apart from other, non-manipulatory tools of influence, it is the comprehensive scope that exposes the limits of ‘value-neutral’ autonomy-based frameworks. When we are manipulated into acquiring a certain trait, there is normally enough left of us that is free of manipulatory influence to anchor some after-the-fact endorsement or alienation test. As an alternative to ‘value-neutral’ autonomy-based analyses, this paper analyses the harm that stems from such systematic manipulation through a capability account of autonomy. Of all the capabilities that are essential to what von Humboldt would call ‘self-realisation’, the capacity to imagine oneself as a different person is critical. It is also the capability that is most endangered by social media’s drive to optimise our online (and offline) environment to maximise user engagement.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Community Planning

This paper examines the role and potential risk of artificial intelligence (AI) powered automated social media accounts in participatory planning processes and broader themes of community well-being. The rapid growth and massive uptake of social media has resulted in a surge in public interest to engage with others around key land development topics. Due to the low cost and high potential engagement, planners and policymakers have been quick to open electronic channels of participation to inform the decision-making process. Doing so has created an opportunity for subversion from groups with alternate and possibly nefarious interests. Anecdotally, we have found that automated social media accounts have been used to further inflate the voice, and therefore influence, of subversive groups in the land development and planning process. While scholars have begun to examine how tech-savvy social media users are manipulating political discourse through the medium of Facebook and Twitter, a dearth of research has yet sought to examine the potential harm that such manipulation could cause to online planning processes and resulting community well-being. This project seeks to explore the risks that social media manipulation might pose to online community discourse around land development and planning topics. To begin to gauge this risk, this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the topic and makes recommendations for future research to measure and analyze the threat to Twitter community well-being posed by AI.

Characterizing social media manipulation in the 2020 U.S. presidential election

Democracies are postulated upon the ability to carry out fair elections, free from any form of interference or manipulation. Social media have been reportedly used to distort public opinion nearing election events in the United States and beyond. With over 240 million election-related tweets recorded between 20 June and 9 September 2020, in this study we chart the landscape of social media manipulation in the context of the upcoming 3 November 2020 U.S. presidential election. We focus on characterizing two salient dimensions of social media manipulation, namely (i) automation (e.g., the prevalence of bots), and (ii) distortion (e.g., manipulation of narratives, injection of conspiracies or rumors). Despite being outnumbered by several orders of magnitude, just a few thousands of bots generated spikes of conversations around real-world political events in all comparable with the volume of activity of humans. We discover that bots also exacerbate the consumption of content produced by users with their same political views, worsening the issue of political echo chambers. Furthermore, coordinated efforts carried out by Russia, China and other countries are hereby characterized. Finally, we draw a clear connection between bots, hyper-partisan media outlets, and conspiracy groups, suggesting the presence of systematic efforts to distort political narratives and propagate disinformation. Our findings may have impactful implications, shedding light on different forms of social media manipulation that may, altogether, ultimately pose a risk to the integrity of the election.

THE POLITICS OF DELETION IN THE BREXIT DEBATE

Literature on influence operations has identified metrics that are indicative of social media manipulation, but few studies have explored the lifecycle of low-quality information. We contribute to this literature by reconstructing nearly 3M messages posted by 1M users in the last days of the Brexit referendum campaign. While previous studies have found that on average only 4% of tweets disappear, we found that 33% of the tweets leading up to the referendum vote are no longer available. Only about half of the most active accounts that tweeted the referendum continue to operate publicly and 20% of all accounts are no longer active. We tested whether partisan content was more likely to disappear and found more messages from the Leave campaign that disappeared than the entire universe of tweets affiliated with the Remain campaign. We compare these results with a set of 45 hashtags posted in the same period and find that political campaigns present much higher ratios of user and tweet decay. These results are validated by inspecting 2M Brexit-related tweets posted over a period of nearly 4 years. The article concludes with an overview of these findings and recommendations for future research.

Self-organization of Citizens in the Age of Digital Communications

The article addresses the issue of civic participation in online communities. It is shown that modern network technologies make it easy to combine institutionalized forms of civic participation with informal practices through social media. In today’s digital world, unique activities have appeared that were not feasible before the introduction of online technologies: hacktivism as a new type of civil disobedience, Internet propaganda, the viral launch of hashtags and challenges in TikTok, monitoring of electoral procedures for webcams, etc. According to the author of the article Numerous publications by scientists about the deep crisis of civil society institutions, in fact, do not describe the decline in civic participation, but its complication and reorientation to more non-hierarchical and creative practices with t ud amenable to analysis by customary methods. According to the author, the increasing influence of information and communication technologies on the political process has contributed to a refocusing of civic activism towards the mediation of politics and media activism. The article emphasizes that the capabilities of Internet technologies contribute to the alienation of citizens from real problems, the rooting of virtual imitation of civic participation, forming the so-called foci of fake activism.The article presents an analysis of a new form of citizen activity – online rallies. The April case of online rallies in 2020 is analyzed in detail using the “Talkers” service of the popular car navigator from Yandex. It is concluded that online rallies will gradually be introduced into the Russian political process. In this regard, online space is becoming more polarized and politically dangerous. It is proved that the self-organization of citizens in online communities contributes to the slow transformation of the existing institutional framework.

“They cowardly attack US, so we nobly eliminate them…”

Abstract The threat of the Islamic State is realised both in its attacks and its discourse. To illustrate the role of linguistic threats, the present study investigates the ISIS online propaganda magazine Dabiq by combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (Romero-Trillo 2008; Baker et al. 2008). Following the two groups described by van Dijk (2003), which are represented by the in-group (ISIS) and the out-group (against ISIS), we propose a third element: the translocal group (i.e., the people in between). The results show the substantial presence of linguistic strategies enhanced by Dangerous Speech (Benesch 2013) to create a high segregation between the groups. Also, the analysis shows the inextricable relationship between conflict and dangerous language and the need to investigate this link further, with special reference to the polarisation of the groups and to the subsequent escalation of violence in discourse.

BotSlayer: DIY Real-Time Influence Campaign Detection

BotSlayer is an application that helps track and detect potential manipulation of information spreading on Twitter. It can be used by journalists, corporations, political candidates, and civil society organizations to discover online coordinated campaigns in real time. BotSlayer uses an anomaly detection algorithm to flag hashtags, links, accounts, phrases, and media that are trending and amplified in a coordinated fashion by likely bots. A Web dashboard lets users explore the tweets and accounts associated with suspicious campaigns, visualize their spread, and search related content on multiple search engines and social media platforms. BotSlayer is easily installed and configured in the cloud. It will aid in the study and early detection of social media manipulation phenomena.

Countering Online Propaganda and Extremism. The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy, edited by Corneliu Bjola and James Pamment

Countering Online Propaganda and Extremism. The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy, edited by Corneliu Bjola and James Pamment

Intersections of the Real and the Virtual Caliphates: The Islamic State's Territory and Media Campaign

Abstract In 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) emerged as one of the most prominent global security threats after securing large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq. By 2018, it has lost nearly all of its territory to the various military forces allied against it. ISIS's territorial expansion correlated with the group's online propaganda activities. With the established contribution of online media efforts to ISIS recruitment and fundraising, isolating factors that correspond to changes in the group's media output takes on added importance. The following study, designed to track ISIS's territorial expansions and contractions from July 2014 to September 2018 against the group's visual output levels and content, seeks to resolve such disputes by both expanding the period of analysis and deconflating land acquisition from other possible variables of analysis. Specifically, the study explores the relationship between territorial control and the visual imagery in ISIS's two English-language online magazines, Dabiq and Rumiyah, across all published issues from July 2014 until September 2017. It also examines any territorial links to the visual imagery in al-Naba’, the group's Arabic-language newsletter, from December 2015 until September 2018. We find that territorial control is significantly associated with changes in the number of images for all publications. Furthermore, we observe an overall trend from military to state-building imagery as territorial losses occur. Thus, territorial changes appeared to influence ISIS's messaging as the group tried to reassure its readers of its continued state presence through a shift toward state-building imagery.

Digital Disinformation and the Imaginative Dimension of Communication

To nuance current understandings of the proliferation of digital disinformation, this article seeks to develop an approach that emphasizes the imaginative dimension of this communication phenomenon. Anchored on ideas about the sociality of communication, this piece conceptualizes how fake news and political trolling online work in relation to particular shared understandings people have of their socio-political landscape. It offers the possibility of expanding the information-oriented approach to communication taken by many journalistic interventions against digital disinformation. It particularly opens up alternatives to the problematic strategy of challenging social media manipulation solely by doubling down on objectivity and facts.

Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

This paper investigates online propaganda strategies of the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—Russian “trolls”—during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We assess claims that the IRA sought either to (1) support Donald Trump or (2) sow discord among the U.S. public by analyzing hyperlinks contained in 108,781 IRA tweets. Our results show that although IRA accounts promoted links to both sides of the ideological spectrum, “conservative” trolls were more active than “liberal” ones. The IRA also shared content across social media platforms, particularly YouTube—the second-most linked destination among IRA tweets. Although overall news content shared by trolls leaned moderate to conservative, we find troll accounts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and these accounts maintain their political alignment. Links to YouTube videos were decidedly conservative, however. While mixed, this evidence is consistent with the IRA’s supporting the Republican campaign, but the IRA’s strategy was multifaceted, with an ideological division of labor among accounts. We contextualize these results as consistent with a pre-propaganda strategy. This work demonstrates the need to view political communication in the context of the broader media ecology, as governments exploit the interconnected information ecosystem to pursue covert propaganda strategies.

Perspektif Remaja Terhadap Dakwah Online Studi Empiris Pada Siswa MA Hasanuddin Siraman Kesamben Blitar

Judging from the times, we will increasingly understand that life goes fast. Good filter ability is a key indicator that everyone must have in facing this development. This article is the result of research that leads to the development of the digital world, especially in the field of online that touches almost all aspects of life. One that attracts researchers is the entry of the online world into the realm of da'wah. Conventional da'wah is done face-to-face, now has experienced many shifts and shifts through online media with the intention of facilitating access. The purpose of writing this article is to analyze adolescent perceptions about online propaganda and preaching methods that are of interest to adolescents with empirical studies of MA students Hasanuddin Siraman, Kesamben, Blitar. This descriptive-qualitative article directly observes adolescents at MA Hasanuddin about their perceptions of online da'wah and the method of da'wah that appeals to adolescents. The selection of adolescents as research subjects is because researchers find data that users of the digital or online world are the most widely held by adolescents, so that indirectly adolescents have the possibility of accessing da'wah online. The method used for this research is observation, interview, and documentation. The data obtained will then be matched using data triangulation techniques to be able to obtain data validity. The results of this study in the form of adolescent perceptions of online propaganda and propaganda methods are in demand by adolescents in this millennial era

Investigating the Role of Social Bots During the 2019 Canadian Election

Threats of social media manipulation during elections have become a central concern for modern democracies. This study tackles the problem of identifying the purpose and origins of social bots during electoral campaigns. We propose a methodology—uniform manifold approximation and projection combined with user-level document embeddings—that efficiently reveals the community structure of social media users. We show that this method can be used to predict the partisan affiliation of social media users with high accuracy, detect anomalous concentrations of social bots, and infer their geographical origin. We illustrate the methodology using Twitter data from the 2019 Canadian electoral campaign. Our evidence supports the thesis that social bots have become an integral component of campaign strategy for national actors. We also demonstrate how the methodology can be used to identify clusters of foreign bots, and we show that such accounts were used to share far-right and environment-related content during the campaign.

Conceptualizing the Impact of Digital Interference in Elections: A Framework and Agenda for Future Research

Concerns over digital interference in elections are widespread. Yet evidence of its impact is still thin and fragmented. How do malicious uses of social media shape, transform, and distort democratic processes? And how should we characterize this impact? Existing research into the effects of social media manipulation has largely focused on measuring its purported impact on opinion swings and voting behavior. Though laudable, this focus might be too reductive. Drawing on normative theories of liberal democracy, this paper argues that the threat of digital interference techniques lies beyond their capacity to change individuals’ political viewpoints and demonstrates how social media manipulation may undermine popular perceptions of electoral integrity, with potentially far-reaching consequences for public trust. Following this assessment, a preliminary research agenda is formulated, highlighting previously overlooked relationships that can be explored to better understand how malicious uses of social media might shape such attitudes and to what effect.

Mapping the online presence and activities of the Islamic State’s unofficial propaganda cell: Ahlut-Tawhid Publications

This paper, which takes the form of a case study, aims to contribute to the debate on activities of the Islamic State’s unofficial media bureaus. Based on tools of open source intelligence, as well as a limited content analysis, it maps the online presence and activities of Ahlut-Tawhid Publications (AHP). Its means of distributing pro-Daesh content in the surface web as well as its general impact are discussed. It also deliberates on the interconnectedness of AHP with other online propaganda cells supporting the self-proclaimed “Caliphate.” This paper argues that this group was part of the ongoing online campaign of the Islamic State in the World Wide Web in 2018 and 2019. It maintained quite an impressive and long-lasting online presence, combining the potential of the most popular microblogs, hosting services and social media with the flexibility of standalone websites. In contrast to the most recognized propaganda cells of Daesh, such as al-Hayat Media Centre or Amaq News Agency whose productions have been quickly detected and removed from the mainstream webpages for years, AHP kept a low profile for the most part of 2018. In effect, it benefited from its relative anonymity and for months operated a network of pro-IS distribution channels throughout Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 environments. This ceased to be the case in 2019, when most of them were incapacitated (banned) by law enforcement or abandoned. It is clear that the attention given to proliferating propaganda through the surface web decreased at this time, probably in favor of the Telegram communication software, as the discovered statistics suggest. The only active (still updated) locations—partially related to Ahlut-Tawhid Publications—belonged to the Bengali Ansar network. It has to be stressed, however, that AHP failed to spark increased attention of Internet users.

#Dark inspiration: Eudaimonic entertainment in extremist Instagram posts

Eudaimonic entertainment, which motivates a reflection on topics such as virtue or meaning, has many benefits, such as fostering wellbeing and inspiring prosocial behavior. Yet, it may also have a darker side when Islamic extremists use accordant elements in online propaganda. So far, this “dark inspiration” has attracted little scholarly interest. The current article fills this gap via a mixed-methods case study of an Islamic extremist influencer on Instagram. The study combined a qualitative content analysis of the account’s postings from 2016 to 2018 ( n = 301 posts), with a hierarchical cluster analysis and digital data on aggregated user response to these posts. I found four types of post, ranging from calls for conservativism to calls for violent jihad. Different eudaimonic cues were used in all four types. Likes and comments varied as a function of type, with the violence promoting posts motivating the largest number of user responses.

Detecting cognitive hacking in visual inspection with physiological measurements

Cyber threats are targeting vulnerabilities of human workers performing tasks in manufacturing processes, including visual inspection to bias their decision-making, thereby sabotaging product quality. This article examines the use of priming as a form of “cognitive hacking” to adversely affect quality inspection decisions in manufacturing, and investigates physiological measurements as means to detect such intrusion. In a within-subject design experiment, twenty participants inspected surface roughness of a manufactured component with and without exposure to priming on the display of an inspection logging system. The results show that the presence of primes impacted accuracy on surface roughness, cortical activities at parietal lobe P4, and eye gaze for inspecting components. The experiment provides supporting evidence that basic hacking of a worker display can be an effective method to alter decision making in inspection. The findings also illustrate that cortical activities and eye gaze can be useful indicators of cognitive hacking. A major implication of the study results is that physiological indicators can be effective at revealing unconscious cognitive influence in visual inspection.

Inciting Violence: The Impact of Internet Propaganda on Terrorist Outcomes

Inciting Violence: The Impact of Internet Propaganda on Terrorist Outcomes

A Storm of Tweets: Social Media Manipulation During the Gulf Crisis — Corrigendum

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