Abstract

Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the alleged use of trolls by Russia to spread malicious content in Western elections. This paper examines the Russian interference campaign in the 2016 US presidential election on Twitter. Our aim is twofold: first, we test whether predicting users who spread trolls’ content is feasible in order to gain insight on how to contain their influence in the future; second, we identify features that are most predictive of users who either intentionally or unintentionally play a vital role in spreading this malicious content. We collected a dataset with over 43 million election-related posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and November 9, 2016, by about 5.7 million users. This dataset includes …

Date

May 13, 2019

Authors

Adam Badawy, Kristina Lerman, Emilio Ferrara

Book

Companion proceedings of the 2019 world wide web conference

Pages

162-168