Abstract
In today’s information technology age, our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. Further, with the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools like social media, disseminating false information and propaganda is both convenient and effective. Groups use social media to coordinate cyber propaganda campaigns in order to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors or perspectives about an event. In this research, we study the online deviant groups (ODGs) who created a lot of cyber propaganda that were projected against the NATO’s Trident Juncture Exercise 2015 (TRJE 2015) on both Twitter and blogs. Anti-NATO narratives were observed on social media websites that got stronger as the TRJE 2015 event approached. Call for civil disobedience, planned protests, and direct action against TRJE 2015 propagated on social media websites. We employ computational social network analysis and cyber forensics informed methodologies to study information competitors who seek to take the initiative and the strategic message away from NATO in order to further their own agenda. Through social cyber forensics tools, e.g., Maltego, we extract metadata associated with propaganda-riddled websites. The extracted metadata helps in the collection of social network information (i.e., friends and followers) and communication network information (i.e., network depicting the flow of information such as tweets, retweets, mentions, and hyperlinks). Through computational social network analysis, we identify influential users and powerful groups (or the focal structures) coordinating the cyber propaganda campaigns. The study examines 21 blogs having over 18,000 blog posts dating back to 1997 and over 9000 Twitter users for the period between August 3, 2014, and September 12, 2015. These blogs were identified, crawled, and stored in our database that is accessible through the Blogtrackers tool. Blogtrackers tool further helped us identify the activity patterns of blogs, keyword patterns, and the influence a blog or a blogger has on the community, and analyze the sentiment diffusion in the community.
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Notes
- 1.
Trident Juncture: NATO’s Largest Military Exercise since Cold War. The “Fictitious Target” is Russia (GlobalResearch.ca, available at http://bit.ly/294Uo2E)
- 2.
War game whoops! NATO exercises end with hovercraft, Humvees stuck in sand (VIDEO) (RT.com, available at http://bit.ly/298ya0R)
- 3.
YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT NATO IS DOING TO PREPARE FOR WORLD WAR 3! (YouTube.com, available at http://bit.ly/29bcH7P)
- 4.
Maltego, available at www.paterva.com/web6/products/maltego.php
- 5.
Paterva (Pty) Ltd. a new train of thought, available at www.paterva.com
- 6.
Scraawl, available at www.scraawl.com
- 7.
ORA NetScenes, available at http://bit.ly/27fuHnv
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Acknowledgements
This research is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (IS-1636933, IIS-1110868 and ACI-1429160), U.S. Office of Naval Research (N000141010091, N000141410489, N0001415P1187, N000141612016, N000141612412, N00014-17-1-2605, and 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), and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Fund at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 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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Al-Khateeb, S., Hussain, M.N., Agarwal, N. (2019). Leveraging Social Network Analysis and Cyber Forensics Approaches to Study Cyber Propaganda Campaigns. In: Özyer, T., Bakshi, S., Alhajj, R. (eds) Social Networks and Surveillance for Society. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78256-0_2
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