Abstract
This work provides a quantitative analysis of the cross-platform disinformation campaign on Twitter against the Syrian Civil Defence group known as the White Helmets. Based on four months of Twitter messages, this article analyzes the promotion of urls from different websites, such as alternative media, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Our study shows that alternative media urls and YouTube videos are heavily promoted together; fact-checkers and official government sites are rarely mentioned; and there are clear signs of a coordinated campaign manifested through repeated messaging from the same user accounts.
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Acknowlegements
This work is supported by the DARPA SocialSim Program and the Air Force Research Laboratory under contract FA8650-18-C-7825. The authors would like to thank Leidos for providing data.
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Horawalavithana, S., Ng, K.W., Iamnitchi, A. (2020). Twitter Is the Megaphone of Cross-platform Messaging on the White Helmets. In: Thomson, R., Bisgin, H., Dancy, C., Hyder, A., Hussain, M. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12268. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61255-9_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61255-9_23
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