Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation
Authors:
- Diogo PachecoDPDiogo Pacheco
- Alessandro FlamminiAFAlessandro Flammini
- Filippo MenczerFMFilippo Menczer
Preprint
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.Keywords
All Related Versions
- Version 1, 2020-03-03, ArXiv
- Published version: , 611.
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