Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation
Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and allies, against the Syria Civil Defense (a.k.a. the White Helmets). We unveil coordinated groups using automatic retweets and content duplication to promote narratives and/or accounts. The results also reveal distinct promoting strategies, ranging from the small groups sharing the exact same text repeatedly, to complex “news website factories” where dozens of accounts synchronously spread the same news from multiple sites.
Source: The Web Conference (WWW)
Institutions: Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3010073762