Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation

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.

To be presented at WWW 2020 Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior and forthcoming in the Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

References in corpus (5)

• The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
• Influence of fake news in Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election
• Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systems
• Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election
• Arming the public with artificial intelligence to counter social bots

Cited by in corpus (7)

• A General Method to Find Highly Coordinating Communities in Social Media through Inferred Interaction Links
• The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media
• Coordinating Narratives and the Capitol Riots on Parler
• Exploring the effect of streamed social media data variations on social network analysis
• Promoting and countering misinformation during Australia's 2019-2020 bushfires: A case study of polarisation
• Unsupervised detection of coordinated information operations in the wild
• Emergent Coordinated Behaviors in Networked LLM Agents: Modeling the Strategic Dynamics of Information Operations