Characterizing the Use of Images by State-Sponsored Troll Accounts on Twitter
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Anecdotal evidence has emerged suggesting that state-sponsored organizations, like the Russian Internet Research Agency, have exploited mainstream social. Their primary goal is apparently to conduct information warfare operations to manipulate public opinion using accounts disguised as "normal" people. To increase engagement and credibility of their posts, these accounts regularly share images. However, the use of images by state-sponsored accounts has yet to be examined by the research community. In this work, we address this gap by analyzing a ground truth dataset of 1.8M images posted to Twitter by called Russian trolls. More specifically, we analyze the content of the images, as well as the posting activity of the accounts. Among other things, we find that image posting activity of Russian trolls is tightly coupled with real-world events, and that their targets, as well as the content shared, changed over time. When looking at the interplay between domains that shared the same images as state-sponsored trolls, we find clear cut differences in the origin and/or spread of images across the Web. Overall, our findings provide new insight into how state-sponsored trolls operate, and specifically how they use imagery to achieve their goals.
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