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Social media platforms have become a hub for political activities and discussions, democratizing participation in these endeavors. However, they have also become an incubator for manipulation campaigns, like information operations (IOs). Some social media platforms have released datasets related to such IOs originating from different countries. However, we lack comprehensive control data that can enable the development of IO detection methods. To bridge this gap, we present new labeled datasets about 26 campaigns, which contain both IO posts verified by a social media platform and over 13M posts by 303k accounts that discussed similar topics in the same time frames (control data). The datasets will facilitate the study of narratives, network interactions, and engagement strategies employed by coordinated accounts across various campaigns and countries. By comparing these coordinated accounts against organic ones, researchers can develop and benchmark IO detection algorithms., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

Coordinated reply attacks are a tactic observed in online influence operations and other coordinated campaigns to support or harass targeted individuals, or influence them or their followers. Despite its potential to influence the public, past studies have yet to analyze or provide a methodology to detect this tactic. In this study, we characterize coordinated reply attacks in the context of influence operations on Twitter. Our analysis reveals that the primary targets of these attacks are influential people such as journalists, news media, state officials, and politicians. We propose two supervised machine-learning models, one to classify tweets to determine whether they are targeted by a reply attack, and one to classify accounts that reply to a targeted tweet to determine whether they are part of a coordinated attack. The classifiers achieve AUC scores of 0.88 and 0.97, respectively. These results indicate that accounts involved in reply attacks can be detected, and the targeted accounts themselves can serve as sensors for influence operation detection.

Knowledge Graph (KG) is a graph based data structure to represent facts of the world where nodes represent real world entities or abstract concept and edges represent relation between the entities. Graph as representation for knowledge has several drawbacks like data sparsity, computational complexity and manual feature engineering. Knowledge Graph embedding tackles the drawback by representing entities and relation in low dimensional vector space by capturing the semantic relation between them. There are different KG embedding models. Here, we discuss translation based and neural network based embedding models which differ based on semantic property, scoring function and architecture they use. Further, we discuss application of KG in some domains that use deep learning models and leverage social media data.

According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital medium. Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks to manipulate public opinion, for political polarization etc. Digital media platforms have introduced new modalities of propaganda such as the use of social bots and state-organized 'troll armies' for social astroturfing to simulate public support or opposition towards a particular topic. Along with this digital media has blurred the line between different forms of propaganda. Hence existing conceptual and epistemological frameworks in propaganda studies need a revision. One of the methods to detect the computational propaganda is to identify automation and bots. Many supervised machine learning based frameworks have been proposed for bot detection but these systems can only identify single accounts, not the coordinated activities of botnets and also these systems depend on the data structure provided by the social media platforms. Similarly, current systems have not included the image features in their detection system. Most of the systems are mainly built for Twitter while there are still uncharted areas of research in other social media platforms. Therefore, there are many unexplored research questions and methods in bot detection systems.

Social media are utilized by millions of citizens to discuss important political issues. Politicians use these platforms to connect with the public and broadcast policy positions. Therefore, data from social media has enabled many studies of political discussion. While most analyses are limited to data from individual platforms, people are embedded in a larger information ecosystem spanning multiple social networks. Here we describe and provide access to the Indiana University 2022 U.S. Midterms Multi-Platform Social Media Dataset (MEIU22), a collection of social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and 4chan. MEIU22 links to posts about the midterm elections based on a comprehensive list of keywords and tracks the social media accounts of 1,011 candidates from October 1 to December 25, 2022. We also publish the source code of our pipeline to enable similar multi-platform research projects., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, forthcoming in ICWSM23

Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. These APIs provide access to public tweets that have not been deleted. However, bad actors can delete content strategically to manipulate the system. Unfortunately, estimates based on publicly available Twitter data underestimate the true deletion volume. Here, we provide the first exhaustive, large-scale analysis of anomalous deletion patterns involving more than a billion deletions by over 11 million accounts. We find that a small fraction of accounts delete a large number of tweets daily. We also uncover two abusive behaviors that exploit deletions. First, limits on tweet volume are circumvented, allowing certain accounts to flood the network with over 26 thousand daily tweets. Second, coordinated networks of accounts engage in repetitive likes and unlikes of content that is eventually deleted, which can manipulate ranking algorithms. These kinds of abuse can be exploited to amplify content and inflate popularity, while evading detection. Our study provides platforms and researchers with new methods for identifying social media abuse.