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1. Strategies and Vulnerabilities of Participants in Venezuelan Influence Operations

   Recabarren, Ruben; Carbunar, Bogdan; Hernandez, Nestor; Shafin, Ashfaq Ali (August 2023, Usenix Security Symposium)

   Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datasets of trolls and bot accounts. However, little is known about the experiences and challenges of human participants in influence operations. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 influence operations participants that contribute to the online image of Venezuela, to understand their incentives, capabilities, and strategies to promote content while evading detection. To validate a subset of their answers, we performed a quantitative investigation using data collected over almost four months, from Twitter accounts they control. We found diverse participants that include pro-government and opposition supporters, operatives and grassroots campaigners, and sockpuppet account owners and real users. While pro-government and opposition participants have similar goals and promotion strategies, they differ in their motivation, organization, adversaries and detection avoidance strategies. We report the Patria framework, a government platform for operatives to log activities and receive benefits. We systematize participant strategies to promote political content, and to evade and recover from Twitter penalties. We identify vulnerability points associated with these strategies, and suggest more nuanced defenses against influence operations. 

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2. Information Operations in Turkey: Manufacturing Resilience with Free Twitter Accounts

   https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v17i1.22175  

   Merhi, Maya; Rajtmajer, Sarah; Lee, Dongwon (June 2023, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

   Following the 2016 US elections Twitter launched their Information Operations (IO) hub where they archive account activity connected to state linked information operations. In June 2020, Twitter took down and released a set of accounts linked to Turkey's ruling political party (AKP). We investigate these accounts in the aftermath of the takedown to explore whether AKP-linked operations are ongoing and to understand the strategies they use to remain resilient to disruption. We collect live accounts that appear to be part of the same network, ~30% of which have been suspended by Twitter since our collection. We create a BERT-based classifier that shows similarity between these two networks, develop a taxonomy to categorize these accounts, find direct sequel accounts between the Turkish takedown and the live accounts, and find evidence that Turkish IO actors deliberately construct their network to withstand large-scale shutdown by utilizing explicit and implicit signals of coordination. We compare our findings from the Turkish operation to Russian and Chinese IO on Twitter and find that Turkey's IO utilizes a unique group structure to remain resilient. Our work highlights the fundamental imbalance between IO actors quickly and easily creating free accounts and the social media platforms spending significant resources on detection and removal, and contributes novel findings about Turkish IO on Twitter. 

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3. Misinformation debunking and cross-platform information sharing through Twitter during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma: a case study on shelters and ID checks

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04016-6  

   Hunt, Kyle; Wang, Bairong; Zhuang, Jun (May 2020, Natural Hazards)

   As the internet and social media continue to become increasingly used for sharing break- ing news and important updates, it is with great motivation to study the behaviors of online users during crisis events. One of the biggest issues with obtaining information online is the veracity of such content. Given this vulnerability, misinformation becomes a very danger- ous and real threat when spread online. This study investigates misinformation debunking efforts and fills the research gap on cross-platform information sharing when misinforma- tion is spread during disasters. The false rumor “immigration status is checked at shelters” spread in both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in 2017 and was analyzed in this paper based on a collection of 12,900 tweets. By studying the rumor control efforts made by thousands of accounts, we found that Twitter users respond and interact the most with tweets from verified Twitter accounts, and especially government organizations. Results on sourcing analysis show that the majority of Twitter users who utilize URLs in their post- ings are employing the information in the URLs to help debunk the false rumor. The most frequently cited information comes from news agencies when analyzing both URLs and domains. This paper provides novel insights into rumor control efforts made through social media during natural disasters and also the information sourcing and sharing behaviors that users exhibit during the debunking of false rumors. 

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4. The Pervasive Presence of Chinese Government Content on Douyin Trending Videos

   https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2022.2.002.LU  

   Lu, Yingdan; Pan, Jennifer (May 2022, Computational communication research)

   As audiences have moved to digital media, so too have governments around the world. While previous research has focused on how authoritarian regimes employ strategies such as the use of fabricated accounts and content to boost their reach, this paper reveals two di!ferent tactics the Chinese government uses on Douyin, the Chinese version of the video-sharing platform TikTok, to compete for audience attention. We use a multi-modal approach that combines analysis of video, text, and meta-data to examine a novel dataset of Douyin videos. We find that a large share of trending videos are produced by accounts affiliated with the Chinese government. These videos contain visual characteristics designed to maximize attention such as high levels of brightness and entropy and very short duration, and are more visually similar to content produced by celebrities and ordinary users than to content from non-official media accounts. We also find that the majority of videos produced by regime-affiliated accounts do not fit traditional definitions of propaganda but rather contain stories and topics unrelated to any aspect of the government, the Chinese Communist Party, policies, or politics. 

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5. “This Isn’t Your Data, Friend”: Black Twitter as a Case Study on Research Ethics for Public Data

   https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221144317  

   Klassen, Shamika; Fiesler, Casey (October 2022, Social Media + Society)

   While research has been conducted with and in marginalized or vulnerable groups, explicit guidelines and best practices centering on specific communities are nascent. An excellent case study to engage within this aspect of research is Black Twitter. This research project considers the history of research with Black communities, combined with empirical work that explores how people who engage with Black Twitter think about research and researchers in order to suggest potential good practices and what researchers should know when studying Black Twitter or other digital traces from marginalized or vulnerable online communities. From our interviews, we gleaned that Black Twitter users feel differently about their content contributing to a research study depending on, for example, the type of content and the positionality of the researcher. Much of the advice participants shared for researchers involved an encouragement to cultivate cultural competency, get to know the community before researching it, and conduct research transparently. Aiming to improve the experience of research for both Black Twitter and researchers, this project is a stepping stone toward future work that further establishes and expands user perceptions of research ethics for online communities composed of vulnerable populations. 

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