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Studying the Weaponization of Social Media: Case Studies of Anti-NATO Disinformation Campaigns

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Open Source Intelligence and Cyber Crime

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

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Abstract

Social media provides a fertile ground for any user to find or share information about various events with others. At the same time, social media is not always used for benign purposes. With the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools, disseminating false information and propaganda is both convenient and effective. In this research, we studied Online Deviant Groups (ODGs) that conduct cyber propaganda campaigns in order to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors or perspectives about an event. We provide case studies in which various disinformation and propaganda swamped social media during two NATO exercises in 2015. We demonstrate ODGs’ capability to spread anti-NATO propaganda using a highly sophisticated and well-coordinated social media campaign. In particular, blogs were used as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. And, to generate discourse, web traffic was driven to these virtual spaces via other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and VKontakte. By further examining the information flows within the social media networks, we identify sources of mis/disinformation and their reach, i.e., how far and how quickly the mis/disinformation could travel and consequently detect manipulation. The chapter presents an in-depth examination of the information networks using social network analysis (SNA) and social cyber forensics (SCF) based methodologies to identify prominent information brokers, leading coordinators, and information competitors who seek to further their own agenda. Through SCF tools, e.g., Maltego, we extract metadata associated with disinformation-riddled websites. The extracted metadata helps in uncovering the implicit relations among various ODGs. We further collected the social network of various ODGs (i.e., their friends and followers) and their communication network (i.e., network depicting the flow of information such as tweets, retweets, mentions, and hyperlinks). SNA helped us identify influential users and powerful groups responsible for coordinating the various disinformation campaigns. One of the key research findings is the vitality of the link between blogs and other social media platforms to examine disinformation campaigns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A person who disseminates provocative posts on social media for the troll's amusement or because (s)he was paid to do so.

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Acknowledgment

This research is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (IIS-1636933, ACI-1429160, and IIS-1110868), U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-10-1-0091, N00014-14-1-0489, N00014-15-P-1187, N00014-16-1-2016, N00014-16-1-2412, N00014-17-1-2605, N00014-17-1-2675), U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-16-1-0189), U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W31P4Q-17-C-0059), the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Fund at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the Arkansas Research Alliance, and Creighton University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. The researchers gratefully acknowledge the support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA

    Katrin Galeano, Rick Galeano & Nitin Agarwal

  2. Department of Journalism, Media, and Computing, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA

    Samer Al-Khateeb

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  1. Katrin Galeano
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  2. Rick Galeano
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  3. Samer Al-Khateeb
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  4. Nitin Agarwal
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Correspondence to Nitin Agarwal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Mohammad A. Tayebi

  2. School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Uwe Glässer

  3. School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

    David B. Skillicorn

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Galeano, K., Galeano, R., Al-Khateeb, S., Agarwal, N. (2020). Studying the Weaponization of Social Media: Case Studies of Anti-NATO Disinformation Campaigns. In: Tayebi, M.A., Glässer, U., Skillicorn, D.B. (eds) Open Source Intelligence and Cyber Crime. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41251-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41251-7_2

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