Abstract

Online manipulation is a pressing concern for democracies, but the actions and strategies of coordinated inauthentic accounts, which have been used to interfere in elections, are not well understood. We analyze a five million-tweet multilingual dataset related to the 2017 French presidential election, when a major information campaign led by Russia called"# MacronLeaks" took place. We utilize heuristics to identify coordinated inauthentic accounts and detect attitudes, concerns and emotions within their tweets, collectively known as socio-linguistic characteristics. We find that coordinated accounts retweet other coordinated accounts far more than expected by chance, while being exceptionally active just before the second round of voting. Concurrently, socio-linguistic characteristics reveal that coordinated accounts share tweets promoting a candidate at three times the rate of non-coordinated accounts. Coordinated account tactics also varied in time to reflect news events and rounds of voting. Our analysis highlights the utility of socio-linguistic characteristics to inform researchers about tactics of coordinated accounts and how these may feed into online social manipulation.

Metadata

publication

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 18 …, 2024

year

2024

publication date

2024/5/28

authors

Keith Burghardt, Ashwin Rao, Georgios Chochlakis, Baruah Sabyasachee, Siyi Guo, Zihao He, Andrew Rojecki, Shrikanth Narayanan, Kristina Lerman

link

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/31305

resource_link

https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/31305/33465

journal

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

volume

18

pages

164-176