short-paper

Narrative Building in Propaganda Networks on Indian Twitter

Authors:

Joyojeet PalAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '22: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

Pages 239 - 244

https://doi.org/10.1145/3501247.3531581

Published: 26 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The misuse of social media platforms to influence public opinion through propaganda campaigns are a cause of rising concern globally. Particularly, countries like India, where politicians communicate with the public through unmediated, curated twitter feeds, have witnessed a significant surge in strategic online manipulation. In this paper, we study propaganda messaging on Indian Twitter during two politically polarizing events. We collect over 80M Hindi and English tweets from over 26k politicians and 6k influencers. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identify major propaganda narratives across all events. We further use a network causal inference based approach to isolate influential actors who play a significant role in propagating the identified narratives. We conclude by discussing how these opinion leaders and their information dissemination, are central to instigating and building propaganda campaigns on Twitter.

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References

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Digital Library

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Anmol Panda, Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, and Joyojeet Pal. 2020. Topical Focus of Political Campaigns and its Impact: Findings from Politicians’ Hashtag Use during the 2019 Indian Elections. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, CSCW1(2020), 1–14.

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Cited By

Sen ADe SPal J(2024)Networks and Influencers in Online Propaganda Events: A Comparative Study of Three Cases in IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537098:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653709

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Narrative Building in Propaganda Networks on Indian Twitter

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cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '22: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

June 2022

479 pages

ISBN:9781450391917

DOI:10.1145/3501247

General Chairs:
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Northeastern University, MA, USA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
,
Katrin Weller
GESIS & Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Germany
,
Organizing Chair:
Manuel Portela
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
,
Program Chairs:
Oshani Seneviratne
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA
,
Ingmar Weber
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
,
Taha Yasseri
University College Dublin, Ireland
,
Publications Chairs:
Anna Bon
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
,
Srinath Srinivas
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India
,
Luis-Daniel Ibáñez
University of Southampton, UK

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Published: 26 June 2022

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WebSci '22

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SIGWEB

WebSci '22: 14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022

June 26 - 29, 2022

Barcelona, Spain

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Cited By

Sen ADe SPal J(2024)Networks and Influencers in Online Propaganda Events: A Comparative Study of Three Cases in IndiaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537098:CSCW1(1-27)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653709

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