Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world
| Autor: | David Schoch, Franziska B. Keller, Sebastian Stier, JungHwan Yang |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Kampagne
campaign Politikwissenschaft social media 300 Social sciences sociology & anthropology Netzwerkanalyse ddc:070 Interactive electronic Media Desinformation Soziale Medien Humans Political Process Elections Political Sociology Political Culture Social sciences sociology anthropology Political science network analysis interaktive elektronische Medien News media journalism publishing Erhebungstechniken und Analysetechniken der Sozialwissenschaften politische Willensbildung politische Soziologie politische Kultur Internet Multidisciplinary Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie Methods and Techniques of Data Collection and Data Analysis Statistical Methods Computer Methods disinformation principal-agent-theory ddc:320 ddc:300 Publizistische Medien Journalismus Verlagswesen Principal-Agent-Modell Social Media |
| Zdroj: | Schoch, David; Keller, Franziska B; Stier, Sebastian; Yang, JungHwan (2022). Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing across the world. Scientific reports, 12(1), p. 4572. Springer Nature 10.1038/s41598-022-08404-9 Scientific Reports |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-022-08404-9 |
| Popis: | Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet’s promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal–agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign’s social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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