Paper Info
Title
Partisanship, Propaganda and Post-Truth Politics: Quantifying Impact in Online Debate.
Abstract
The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues. This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their strategies for influencing and manipulating public opinion online: partisan media, state-backed propaganda, and post-truth politics. In particular, we present quantitative research on the presence and impact of these three `Psu0027 in online Twitter debates in two contexts: (i) the run up to the UK EU membership referendum (`Brexitu0027); and (ii) the information operations of Russia-backed online troll accounts. We first compare the impact of highly partisan versus mainstream media during the Brexit referendum, specifically comparing tweets by half a million `leaveu0027 and `remainu0027 supporters. Next, online propaganda strategies are examined, specifically left- and right-wing troll accounts. Lastly, we study the impact of misleading claims made by the political leaders of the leave and remain campaigns. This is then compared to the impact of the Russia-backed partisan media and propaganda accounts during the referendum. In particular, just two of the many misleading claims made by politicians during the referendum were found to be cited in 4.6 times more tweets than the 7,103 tweets related to Russia Today and Sputnik and in 10.2 times more tweets than the 3,200 Brexit-related tweets by the Russian troll accounts.
Year
Venue
DocType
2019
arXiv: Computers and Society
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1902.01752
0
0.34
References 
Authors
4
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Genevieve Gorrell126622.00
Mehmet E. Bakir2123.77
Ian Roberts320717.68
Mark A. Greenwood426920.60
Benedetta Iavarone500.34
Kalina Bontcheva62538211.33