Thread by @joyopal

In light of recent events in India, our paper "Narrative Building in Propaganda Networks on Indian Twitter" out today at #WebSci22 sheds some light on how hyper-partisan information is repeated, especially through a selection of influencers who consistently go viral.

A thread:

https://twitter.com/ingmarweber/status/1541705273286561793

We curated and studied a large amount of data (over 80 million tweets in Hindi and English tweets from over 26000 politicians and 6000 influencers), for propagandist content.

For each event, we outline how we classify tweets, detect propaganda, extract narratives (ie how the propaganda is framed), and finally estimate impact of each thread. These are detailed in the full paper.

When a major event takes place, a set of influencers typically converge on a specific narrative of the event, and aggressively retweeted by their followers, but also a pyramid structure of lower-level influencers.

The same influencers repeatedly show up across major events.

Each major event has sub-narratives, each driven by a set of influencers.

With CAA, sub narratives like nationalism, politics etc, were put out, some stuck with audiences. THESE in turn get amplified.

Here is the node structure for the PFI narrrative which emerged & went viral

Once "PFI" goes viral as anti-national, associated narratives (eg Shaheen Bagh) can also follow the same narrative, since the influencers who drive them have convergent sets of followers.

Despite precipitating events of viral social media significance being fundamentally different – migrants, COVID, Bollywood etc, the same set of accounts act as connectors to turn a narrative towards an accepted dogma, that one group is a consistent villain irrespective of event.

Work done by the consistently sharp @DashSaloni with @skhndh and @AryaArshia

Full paper with methodological details here:

joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/wp-content/upl…