Leveraging Social Network Analysis and Cyber Forensics Approaches to Study Cyber Propaganda Campaigns

Abstract

In today's information technology age, our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. Further, with the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools like social media, disseminating false information and propaganda is both convenient and effective. Groups use social media to coordinate cyber propaganda campaigns in order to achieve strategic and political goals, influence mass thinking, and steer behaviors or perspectives about an event. In this research, we study the online deviant groups (ODGs) who created a lot of cyber propaganda that were projected against the NATO's Trident Juncture Exercise 2015 (TRJE 2015) on both Twitter and blogs. Anti-NATO narratives were observed on social media websites that got stronger as the TRJE 2015 event approached. Call for civil disobedience, planned protests, and direct action against TRJE 2015 propagated on social media websites. We employ computational social network analysis and cyber forensics informed methodologies to study information competitors who seek to take the initiative and the strategic message away from NATO in order to further their own agenda. Through social cyber forensics tools, e.g., Maltego, we extract metadata associated with propaganda-riddled websites. The extracted metadata helps in the collection of social network information (i.e., friends and followers) and communication network information (i.e., network depicting the flow of information such as tweets, retweets, mentions, and hyperlinks). Through computational social network analysis, we identify influential users and powerful groups (or the focal structures) coordinating the cyber propaganda campaigns. The study examines 21 blogs having over 18,000 blog posts dating back to 1997 and over 9000 Twitter users for the period between August 3, 2014, and September 12, 2015. These blogs were identified, crawled, and stored in our database that is accessible through the Blogtrackers tool. Blogtrackers tool further helped us identify the activity patterns of blogs, keyword patterns, and the influence a blog or a blogger has on the community, and analyze the sentiment diffusion in the community.