Content-based features predict social media influence operations
Open accessAbstract
Coordinated political influence operations leave a distinct signature in content that machine learning can detect.
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National-level, covert information channeling is one of the few forms of repression where foreign state actors intervene to influence other countries' domestic politics.
“National-level, covert information channeling (Table 2, cell 4) is one of the few forms of repression where foreign state actors intervene to influence other countries’ domestic politics (157).”
From Physical and virtual repertoires of contention (2022) · cites this paper as [157]
The Introduction (page unavailable) defines coordinated influence operations as campaigns that can target another state's politics through social-media content designed to appear indigenous; it also names foreign governments as possible actors. It does not characterize these operations as a form of repression or establish that they are one of the few forms involving foreign-state intervention. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Cites
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“A small body of work has shown that it is possible to find coordinated influence efforts on social media using unsupervised ( 4 , 20 ) or supervised machine learning ( 21 , 22 ).”
Who Falls for Online Political Manipulation?
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Earl, J. (2022) · Science Advances · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abl8198 · Cited by 250 · see citing works
Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube
Hosseinmardi, H., Ghasemian, A., Clauset, A., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D. M., & Watts, D. J. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2101967118 · Cited by 171 · see citing works
Kingdom of Trolls? Influence Operations in the Saudi Twittersphere
Barrie, C., & Siegel, A. (2021) · Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media · doi:10.51685/jqd.2021.012 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“3For an exception see Alizadeh et al. 2020.”
BackgroundTucker, J. A. (2023) · Handbook of Computational Social Science for Policy · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-16624-2_20 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Alizadeh, M., Shapiro, J. N., Buntain, C., & Tucker, J. A.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- New Jersey Institute of Technology (US)
- New York University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Alizadeh, Meysam
- Venue
- Science Advances
- Published
- 2020-07-24
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 30
- Pages
- eabb5824-eabb5824
- ISSN
- 2375-2548 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7439640
- OpenAlex
- W3043892524
- Cited by
- 90
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 19.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Science Advances (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Microsoft
- Bertelsmann Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Keywords
- influence operations, content-based features, machine learning classification, United States, Twitter, Reddit, user-generated content
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