(Dis)Information Wars

Abstract:

The growth of big data and big data technologies has greatly expanded information availability across the globe. This has in turn led to the widespread use of social media platforms and the emergence of these platforms as prominent vehicles for displaying dissidence during episodes of political unrest. A new approach taken by oppressive governments to counter this trend is to spread false information on the platform and engage in a disinformation war. We use data from Farsi-Twitter during the recent wave of protests in Iran to understand the extent and mechanism of disinformation wars. We identify accounts that engage in spreading disinformation and use the characteristics that predict such engagement to assign a “disinformation score” to all Farsi-Twitter accounts. This score can guide safe users and inform policies to contain the spread of disinformation on social media. We run a number of counterfactual studies to test the effectiveness of various policy interventions.