Russian Social Media Influence: Understanding Russian Propaganda in Eastern Europe

Helmus, Todd C.; Bodine-Baron, Elizabeth; Radin, Andrew; Magnuson, Madeline; Mendelsohn, Joshua; Marcellino, William; Bega, Andriy; Winkelman, Zev

doi:10.7249/rr2237

Cited by 62 publications

(73 citation statements)

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“…A source was labeled as junk news when it fulfilled at least three out our five criteria (professionalism, style, credibility, bias, and counterfeit). The subcategory Russia consisted exclusively of state-funded Russian sources such as Russia Today and Sputnik to their known slanted reporting and application of propaganda techniques (Helmus, 2018).…”

Section: Typologizing Political News and Information On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Neudert

Howard

Kollányi

2019

Social Media + Society

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Voters increasingly rely on social media for news and information about politics. But increasingly, social media has emerged as a fertile soil for deliberately produced misinformation campaigns, conspiracy, and extremist alternative media. How does the sourcing of political news and information define contemporary political communication in different countries in Europe? To understand what users are sharing in their political communication, we analyzed large volumes of political conversation over a major social media platform—in real-time and native languages during campaign periods—for three major European elections. Rather than chasing a definition of what has come to be known as “fake news,” we produce a grounded typology of what users actually shared and apply rigorous coding and content analysis to define the types of sources, compare them in context with known forms of political news and information, and contrast their circulation patterns in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Based on this analysis, we offer a definition of “junk news” that refers to deliberately produced misleading, deceptive, and incorrect propaganda purporting to be real news. In the first multilingual, cross-national comparison of junk news sourcing and consumption over social media, we analyze over 4 million tweets from three elections and find that (1) users across Europe shared substantial amounts of junk news in varying qualities and quantities, (2) amplifier accounts drive low to medium levels of traffic and news sharing, and (3) Europeans still share large amounts of professionally produced information from media outlets, but other traditional sources of political information including political parties and government agencies are in decline.

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Section: Typologizing Political News and Information On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Neudert

Howard

Kollányi

2019

Social Media + Society

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“…Better understanding the context-the wider mental health conversation on Twitter-helped us get a richer sense of why and how the campaign affected social media discourse. Prior research has used the community lexical analysis techniques we used in the current evaluation and shown that the communities identified in the social media analysis match known communities and a priori expectations based on qualitative descriptions (e.g., Bodine-Baron et al, 2016;Helmus et al, 2018).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Los Angeles County's Mental Health Community Engagement Campaign

Eberhart¹,

Marcellino²,

Davis³

et al. 2018

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The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LAC DMH) recently undertook a youth-targeted social marketing campaign that sought to increase community engagement around barriers to mental health access. LAC DMH's campaign utilized funds from Proposition 63, which was signed into law as the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA). The MHSA levied a 1 percent state-level tax on all California personal incomes over $1 million, resulting in a substantial investment in mental health. A portion of those funds is specifically allocated for prevention and early intervention (PEI) activities and cannot be used for other purposes (e.g., treatment, housing). LAC DMH dedicated some of these MHSA PEI funds to the development and implementation of a social marketing campaign. In partnership with the California Mental Health Services Authority (CalMHSA), LAC DMH requested an evaluation of the campaign. Through the current evaluation, LAC DMH sought to understand who was reached by the campaign and what the impact of that contact was. RAND Health Care This evaluation was undertaken by RAND Health Care, a division of the RAND Corporation, and funded by CalMHSA. A profile of RAND Health Care, abstracts of its publications, and ordering information can be found at www.rand.org/health. CalMHSA The California Mental Health Services Authority (CalMHSA) is an organization of county governments working to improve mental health outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. Prevention and early intervention programs implemented by CalMHSA are funded by counties through the voter-approved Mental Health Services Act (Prop. 63). Prop. 63 provides the funding and framework needed to expand mental health services to previously underserved populations and all of California's diverse communities.

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“…As a seemingly uncontrolled channel of information, SNS became essential tools in the formation of alternative geopolitical narratives of conflicts, geographical imaginations about particular places and regions and their relations to political centres, a geopolitical picture of the world and relations between countries. Social media operations are an essential part of Russian propaganda in Eastern Europe (Helmus, T.C. et al 2018).…”

Section: Political Behaviour In Social Networking Sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Euromaidan and conflict in Eastern Ukraine in social networking sites: Territorial differences of pro-Russian subscriptions in Ukraine

Dobysh

2019

HunGeoBull

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Securitization of cyberspace is of great geopolitical concern. Behaviour on the Internet is not diminishing the influence of existing borders but can polarize society along territorial divisions. The paper explores territorial differences in the subscription to public pages and open groups in social networking sites (SNS), which emerged as a reaction to revolutionary events in Ukraine (known as Euromaidan or Revolution of Dignity) in 2013-2014 and Russia-backed armed conflict in the East of the country. The findings show differences in subscription to such pages in Vkontakte (the most popular SNS in Ukraine before a ban in 2017) among citizens of Ukraine and Russia, regional centres in Ukraine, cities in uncontrolled by Ukrainian government territories, reclaimed by Ukrainian army territories, territories of Lugansk and Donetsk regions which were not under substantial control of Russia-backed separatists, and peripherial cities of the neighbouring Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhya oblasts. The paper also analyzes the geopolitical narratives of pro-Russian public pages in Vkontakte and shows how SNS could be used as a geopolitical tool.

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Russian Social Media Influence: Understanding Russian Propaganda in Eastern Europe

Cited by 62 publications

References 0 publications

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Sourcing and Automation of Political News and Information During Three European Elections

Evaluating Los Angeles County's Mental Health Community Engagement Campaign

Euromaidan and conflict in Eastern Ukraine in social networking sites: Territorial differences of pro-Russian subscriptions in Ukraine

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