论文标题
领导者还是追随者？对IRA巨魔的推文的时间分析
Leaders or Followers? A Temporal Analysis of Tweets from IRA Trolls
论文作者
论文摘要
互联网研究机构（IRA）影响了美国的在线政治对话，加剧了现有的党派分裂和播种不和谐。在本文中，我们通过分析Twitter上的趋势术语来确定IRA领导或关注其他用户的案例，研究IRA的沟通策略。我们的分析侧重于2016年至2017年之间的超过3800万推文（n = 3,613），记者（n = 976），国会议员（n = 526）以及一般公众参与政治用户（n = 71,128）。我们发现，IRA倾向于领导与2016年大选，种族和娱乐有关的主题，这表明这些领域既具有战略重要性，又具有最大的潜在影响。此外，我们确定了IRA相对无效的主题，例如有关军事，政治丑闻和暴力袭击的推文。尽管关于这些主题有很多推文，但IRA很少引领对话，因此几乎没有机会影响它。我们提供建议的方法，以实时跟踪未来影响力运营的战略选择。
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing trending terms on Twitter to identify cases in which the IRA leads or follows other users. Our analysis focuses on over 38M tweets posted between 2016 and 2017 from IRA users (n=3,613), journalists (n=976), members of Congress (n=526), and politically engaged users from the general public (n=71,128). We find that the IRA tends to lead on topics related to the 2016 election, race, and entertainment, suggesting that these are areas both of strategic importance as well having the highest potential impact. Furthermore, we identify topics where the IRA has been relatively ineffective, such as tweets on military, political scandals, and violent attacks. Despite many tweets on these topics, the IRA rarely leads the conversation and thus has little opportunity to influence it. We offer our proposed methodology as a way to track the strategic choices of future influence operations in real-time.
