论文标题
国家赞助的巨魔是否塑造了2016年美国总统选举话语?量化对Twitter的影响
Did State-sponsored Trolls Shape the 2016 US Presidential Election Discourse? Quantifying Influence on Twitter
论文作者
论文摘要
在2016年美国总统大选期间经营的国家赞助的Twitter帐户是一个广泛接受的事实,传播了数百万条带有错误信息和炎症政治内容的推文。所谓的“巨魔”帐户的这些社交媒体运动是否能够操纵公众舆论。在这里,我们从那时起分析了1.525亿条推文(由990万用户)来量化Twitter对Twitter的影响。数据包含来自Twitter本身标识的822个巨魔帐户的原始推文。我们使用图形分析技术以及游戏理论的中心度度量构建和分析了930万个节点和1.69亿个边缘的非常大的交互图。然后,我们量化了所有Twitter帐户对转发级联的总体信息交换的影响。我们提供了所有Twitter帐户的全球影响力排名,我们发现一个巨魔帐户出现在前100名中,而在前1000名中出现了四个。这与本文提出的其他发现相结合,证据表明,网络中病毒性和影响力的驱动力来自常规用户 - 尚未被Twitter归类为巨魔的用户。另一方面,我们发现,平均而言,巨魔帐户的影响力是普通用户的数十倍。此外,Twitter现在已经暂停了前100名和前1000名的常规帐户的23%和22%。这引发了有关他们在2016年美国总统大选期间的真实性和实践的疑问。
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election, spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns of the so-called "troll" accounts were able to manipulate public opinion is still in question. Here, we quantify the influence of troll accounts on Twitter by analyzing 152.5 million tweets (by 9.9 million users) from that period. The data contain original tweets from 822 troll accounts identified as such by Twitter itself. We construct and analyse a very large interaction graph of 9.3 million nodes and 169.9 million edges using graph analysis techniques, along with a game-theoretic centrality measure. Then, we quantify the influence of all Twitter accounts on the overall information exchange as is defined by the retweet cascades. We provide a global influence ranking of all Twitter accounts and we find that one troll account appears in the top-100 and four in the top-1000. This combined with other findings presented in this paper constitute evidence that the driving force of virality and influence in the network came from regular users - users who have not been classified as trolls by Twitter. On the other hand, we find that on average, troll accounts were tens of times more influential than regular users were. Moreover, 23% and 22% of regular accounts in the top-100 and top-1000 respectively, have now been suspended by Twitter. This raises questions about their authenticity and practices during the 2016 US presidential election.