Paper presented by Axel Bruns as part of the workshop Integrity 2021: Integrity in Social Networks and Media at the 14th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in Jerusalem, Israel, March 2021.
Social media marketing/Seo expert and digital marketing
Social Media News Spread Approaches to Misinformation
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Social Media and the News:
Approaches to the Spread of (Mis)information
Axel Bruns (on behalf of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre team)
a.bruns@qut.edu.au / @snurb_dot_info
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Axel Bruns and Tobias R. Keller. “News Diffusion on
Twitter: Comparing the Dissemination Careers for
Mainstream and Marginal News .” Paper presented at
the Social Media & Society 2020 conference, online, 22
July 2020.
News Diffusion
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Background
• ‘True’ and ‘false’ news:
• “Lies spread faster than the truth” (Science tagline)
• “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and
more broadly than the truth” (p. 1)
• “it took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to
reach 1500 people” (p. 3)
• But: only retweet cascades that received an @reply linking
to a fact-checking site (supp. mat. p. 11)
• Limited generalisability:
• Only fact-checked stories – what about ordinary,
noncontroversial news?
• Retweet cascades – what about link sharing?
• Aggregate patterns – what about site-by-site differences?
• 2006-2017 timeframe – what about evolution in practices? Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The Spread of True and False News Online.
Science, 359, 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559
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60 mins. x 24 hours x 60 days
= 86,400 mins.
0 mins.: first recorded tweet
sharing the story URL
100%: total count of tweets
sharing the URL after 60 days
Note: logarithmic scale to better
show early sharing patterns
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Raw Story, Gateway Pundit, and
some Russian state media sites in Turkish,
Spanish, Arabic disseminate most quickly
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Specialist sites shared more slowly:
The Conversation – scholarly contributions
Judicial Watch – hyperpartisan lawfare
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Key Observations and Further Outlook
• Overall:
• Mis-/disinformation and fringe news doesn’t necessarily disseminate faster than ‘real’, mainstream news
• Substantial differences between different types of sites in either category
• Speed of dissemination likely linked mainly to type of news coverage and intended audience
• Next steps:
• Current study limited to major stories from major Australian mainstream / US fringe media sites during 2019
• Plan to extend analysis to broader range of sites, stories, and different kinds of bots
• Patterns may look different during times of heightened activity – e.g. bushfires, COVID-19 crisis
• Combination of time-series and network analysis and close reading required to reveal full picture
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Axel Bruns, Tim Graham, Brenda Moon, Tobias R. Keller,
and Dan Angus. “Sharing, Spamming, Sockpuppeting:
Comparing the Twitter Dissemination Careers of News
Articles from Mainstream and Suspect News Outlets.”
Paper presented at the International Communication
Association conference, online, 20 May 2020.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Timothy Graham, Rui Zhang, Yifei
Zhang, Robert Ackland, and Lexing Xie. #DebateNight:
The Role and Influence of Socialbots on Twitter During the
1st 2016 US Presidential Debate. In 12th International
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, June 2018.
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM18/pa
per/view/17886
Timothy Graham, Robert Ackland, and Lewis Mitchell. A
Novel Network-Based Approach to Detecting and
Analysing Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour on Twitter.
Paper presented at the 5th annual Australian Social
Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC2020), 25-27
November 2020, Perth.
Inauthentic Behaviour
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Co-(re)tweet Networks
• Co-(re)tweeting:
• Multiple accounts tweeting/retweeting same URL within
seconds
• Increasingly suspicious if behaviour is repeated
• FakeNIX – 10,418 nodes and 42,913 edges
• Giant cluster of MAGA/Pro-Trump coordinated amplification
• JudicialWatch (JW) sockpuppeting
• @EvangTwitBot and @ConservTwitBot
• Co-retweeted JW 249 times
• Both suspended
• By comparison, the ATNIX co-retweet network only resulted
in 48 nodes and 33 edges
Co-retweet network
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Judicial Watch:
Trump ‘re-tweet’ accounts
The Conversation:
[City]Connect accounts
(now suspended)
Edges coloured by average time between URL co-tweets, from yellow (0 secs.) to red (60 secs.)
18. Debate Night 2016
• Dataset of 6.5 million tweets; 1.45
million accounts
• See: Rizoiu, Graham et al. (2018)
• Nodes: Twitter accounts.
• Edges: Accounts that
co-retweeted within 1 second of
each other, at least twice.
• 25,242 nodes
• 89,708 edges
• Account status colour codes:
• Suspended
• Deleted
• Active
19. Debate Nights 2020
• Nodes: Twitter accounts.
• Edges: Accounts that
co-retweeted within 60 seconds of
each other, at least twice.
• Network filtered by minimum
edge weight = 5.
• 132,207 nodes (100% visible)
• 1,759,336 edges (1.98% visible)
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‘Coordination network toolkit’ 0.1.0
• A small command line tool and set of functions for
studying multiple types of coordination networks in
Twitter and other social media data
• Available now! Open source on GitHub and through PyPi
• https://github.com/QUT-Digital-Observatory/coordination-
network-toolkit
• https://pypi.org/project/coordination-network-toolkit/
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Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Eddy Hurcombe.
"‘Corona? 5G? Or Both?’: The Dynamics of COVID-19/5G
Conspiracy Theories on Facebook." Media International
Australia (2020). DOI:10.1177/1329878X20946113.
Tim Graham and Axel Bruns. “'Like a Virus' –
Disinformation in the Age of COVID-19.” Seminar
presented in the Australia Institute's Australia at
Home series, 23 Apr. 2020.
Conspiracy Theories
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Key Takeaways So Far
• Social media and the COVID-19 infodemic:
• Conspiracy emergence parallels virus outbreak since mid-January 2020
• This seeds subsequent activity (especially on the right fringe)
• Some evidence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour on both Facebook and Twitter
• Notable content take-downs (on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter), but much remains
• Conspiracy theories and the media:
• Substantial spread begins only once mainstream media amplify conspiracies
• Entertainment and tabloid media serve as amplifiers for audiences beyond the conspiratorial fringe
• Celebrity and politician endorsements provide further extension and amplification
• Fringe media outlets report mainstream coverage as endorsement of their earlier stories
• Official government and corporate statements arrive too late to counteract spread
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Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Louisa Bartolo, and Betsy
Alpert. Non-Problematic Uses of Automation: Examining
the Sharing of Youtube Videos on Twitter at Scale and
over Time. #SMARTdatasprint 2021: The Current State of
Platformisation, Lisbon, 1-5 Feb. 2021.
https://smart.inovamedialab.org/2021-
platformisation/theme/
YouTube
(Video soon.)
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Data
• Tweets matching (coronavirus OR wuhan) (youtube OR youtu.be)
• 1 February to 31 May 2020
• Total number of unique tweets containing YouTube URLs: 1,716,203
• Unique YouTube video IDs: 830,058
• Data collected by the QUT Digital Observatory
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BIN 0
Videos in this bin
have only been
tweeted once or
twice per user on
average
“Potential viral
videos”
BIN 1
Videos in this bin
have only been
tweeted by a few to
many times per user
on average
“Allegedly normally
distributed bin”
BIN 2
Videos in this bin
have been tweeted a
very high number of
times per user on
average
“Suspicious
automated
behaviour”
30. RankFlow diagram of YouTube sharing on Twitter
February 2020: Top 20 daily most shared YouTube URLs
2. The colour indicates whether
many diverse or just a few
unique users shared the same
video
1. The height of the bar indicates the
number of times the video was
tweeted
BIN 2: Suspicious behaviour
BIN 0: Potential viral videos
BIN 1: Bin to be explored
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Observations
• Users do not only engage in automated behaviour for ideological purposes (e.g. ‘foreign
interference’) or commercial purposes (e.g. spammers), but also as a professionalisation tactic
• Some of these strategies fit into platforms’ understanding of ‘inauthentic behaviour’, but this
behaviour is often not coordinated nor linked to problematic content
• Inauthentic or automated sharing of YouTube videos around newsworthy events on Twitter (e.g.
COVID-19) is not always “coordinated”
• Platforms’ content-agnostic approach to “platform manipulation” can have unintended
consequences for aspiring content creators eager to gain visibility at all costs
• In many cases, it seems that the only way to make a distinction between deceptive and non-
deceptive behaviour is to focus on content
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Nicholas Carah and Daniel Angus. Algorithmic Brand
Culture: Participatory Labour, Machine Learning and
Branding on Social Media. Media, Culture & Society 40.2
(2018): 178–194.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718754648
Instagram
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Insta-explorer
• Designed to aid qualitative analysis of Instagram content
• Accepts json and image data gathered via Instamancer
• https://github.com/andyepx/insta-explorer/releases
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Scraping (Is Not a Dirty Word)
• Post-API age (Freelon, 2018)
• Server-side API for research would be great, but are we going to die waiting? (Bruns, 2019)
• Pragmatic response is to improve access and utility of scraping tools:
• Technical advances, e.g. grafting
• Make code available, and documented
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Platforms and Researchers
• Unresolved tensions:
• Social media platforms are too important to be left unscrutinised
• Critical, independent, public-interest research is crucial
• Shaping of research limits by platform directives is unacceptable
• Terms of Service cannot trump public interest
• Commitment by the research community:
• Critical self-assessment of our uses of data
• Diligent adherence to established ethical standards
• Careful management of data and sharing practices
• Great care to demonstrate that we can be trusted with the data
• Commitment by platform providers?
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Cato the Elder, ca. 157 BCE
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Furthermore, I propose that Carthage is to be destroyed.
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Social Media Researchers, ca. 2021 CE
Furthermore, we demand that social media platforms
provide data access to critical, independent, public-interest research.
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This research is funded by the Australian Research Council projects
DP200101317 Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation,
DP200100519 Using Machine Vision to Explore Instagram’s Everyday Promotional Cultures, and
FT130100703 Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere,
by the Department of Defence Science and Technology (DST Group) and the Operations Research
Network (ORnet), by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology, and by the Swiss
National Science Foundation postdoc mobility grant P2ZHP1_184082 Political Social Bots in the
Australian Twittersphere. It is also supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the QUT eResearch
Office, Division of Research and Innovation. Facebook data are provided courtesy of CrowdTangle.
Coordination Network Toolkit developed with Sam Hames and Betsy Alpert from the QUT Digital
Observatory.
Acknowledgments