The Adaptive Strategies of Anti-Kremlin Digital Dissent in Telegram during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07135v1
• Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 18:10:06 GMT
• Title: The Adaptive Strategies of Anti-Kremlin Digital Dissent in Telegram during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
• Authors: Apaar Bawa, Ugur Kursuncu, Dilshod Achilov, Valerie L. Shalin,
• Abstract summary: This study examines the dynamics of Anti-Kremlin content on Telegram over seven phases of the invasion. A data-driven, computational analysis of emerging topics revealed the Russian economy, combat updates, international politics, and Russian domestic affairs. Viewer approval of those events that threaten Kremlin control suggests that Telegram levels the online playing field for the opposition.
• Score: 0.6178017970021517
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: During Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Telegram became an essential social media platform for Kremlin-sponsored propaganda dissemination. Over time, Anti-Kremlin Russian opposition channels have also emerged as a prominent voice of dissent against the state-sponsored propaganda. This study examines the dynamics of Anti-Kremlin content on Telegram over seven phases of the invasion, inspired by the concept of breach in narrative theory. A data-driven, computational analysis of emerging topics revealed the Russian economy, combat updates, international politics, and Russian domestic affairs, among others. Using a common set of statistical contrasts by phases of the invasion, a longitudinal analysis of topic prevalence allowed us to examine associations with documented offline events and viewer reactions, suggesting an adaptive breach-oriented communications strategy that maintained viewer interest. Viewer approval of those events that threaten Kremlin control suggests that Telegram levels the online playing field for the opposition, surprising given the Kremlin's suppression of free speech offline.

Related papers

• PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent [71.20471076045916]
  Propaganda plays a critical role in shaping public opinion and fueling disinformation. Propainsight systematically dissects propaganda into techniques, arousal appeals, and underlying intent. Propagaze combines human-annotated data with high-quality synthetic data.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-19T06:28:18Z)
• Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram [7.759087666892532]
  Information-based attacks on social media, such as disinformation campaigns and propaganda, are emerging cybersecurity threats. We propose a novel mechanism for detecting propaganda that capitalizes on the relationship between legitimate user messages and propaganda replies. Our method is faster, cheaper, and has a detection rate (97.6%) 11.6 percentage points higher than human moderators after seeing only one message from an account.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-12T11:07:27Z)
• Analyzing the Strategy of Propaganda using Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Evidence from the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine [21.563820572163337]
  The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. Here, we analyze the strategy of the Twitter community using an inverse reinforcement learning approach. We show that bots respond predominantly to pro-invasion messages, while messages indicating opposition primarily elicit responses from humans.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-24T13:35:18Z)
• Russo-Ukrainian War: Prediction and explanation of Twitter suspension [47.61306219245444]
  This study focuses on the Twitter suspension mechanism and the analysis of shared content and features of user accounts that may lead to this. We have obtained a dataset containing 107.7M tweets, originating from 9.8 million users, using Twitter API. Our results reveal scam campaigns taking advantage of trending topics regarding the Russia-Ukrainian conflict for Bitcoin fraud, spam, and advertisement campaigns.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-06T08:41:02Z)
• Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram [5.161088104035108]
  We study how 16 Russian media outlets interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. We show that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram but that they source material from the messaging platform. For example, across the websites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of articles discussed content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-01-25T22:27:40Z)
• Automated multilingual detection of Pro-Kremlin propaganda in newspapers and Telegram posts [5.886782001771578]
  The full-scale conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine generated an unprecedented amount of news articles and social media data. This study analyses how the media affected and mirrored public opinion during the first month of the war using news articles and Telegram news channels in Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian and English. We propose and compare two methods of multilingual automated pro-Kremlin propaganda identification, based on Transformers and linguistic features.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-01-25T14:25:37Z)
• Twitter Dataset on the Russo-Ukrainian War [68.713984286035]
  We have initiated an ongoing dataset acquisition from Twitter API. The dataset has reached the amount of 57.3 million tweets, originating from 7.7 million users. We apply an initial volume and sentiment analysis, while the dataset can be used to further exploratory investigation towards topic analysis, hate speech, propaganda recognition, or even show potential malicious entities like botnets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-04-07T12:33:06Z)
• Uncovering the Dark Side of Telegram: Fakes, Clones, Scams, and Conspiracy Movements [67.39353554498636]
  We perform a large-scale analysis of Telegram by collecting 35,382 different channels and over 130,000,000 messages. We find some of the infamous activities also present on privacy-preserving services of the Dark Web, such as carding. We propose a machine learning model that is able to identify fake channels with an accuracy of 86%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-26T14:53:31Z)
• The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media [43.2770127582382]
  We analyze the spread of propaganda and its interplay with coordinated behavior on a large Twitter dataset about the 2019 UK general election. The combination of the use of propaganda and coordinated behavior allows us to uncover the authenticity and harmfulness of the different communities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-09-27T13:39:10Z)
• A Few Observations About State-Centric Online Propaganda [0.7106986689736826]
  This paper presents a few observations about pro-Kremlin propaganda between 2015 and early 2021 with a dataset from the East Stratcom Task Force (ESTF) Instead of focusing on misinformation and disinformation, the observations are motivated by classical propaganda research and the ongoing transformation of media systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-09T14:22:52Z)
• Russian trolls speaking Russian: Regional Twitter operations and MH17 [68.8204255655161]
  In 2018, Twitter released data on accounts identified as Russian trolls. We analyze the Russian-language operations of these trolls. We find that trolls' information campaign on the MH17 crash was the largest in terms of tweet count.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-13T19:48:12Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.