Time series analysis and its applications

The article examines and analyzes the linguistic and psychological features of political discourse using a computer-based Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) content analysis program to explore the relationship between political discourse and the personality of politicians. As for political discourse, it is perhaps the communicator, the linguistic personality, who plays the most important role in the communication. The linguistic personality of a politician is of particular interest in political discourse content-analysis, since it has the greatest influence on the public consciousness via mass media. Using text as a source of psychological and cognitive information has been gaining popularity. Researchers use a variety of methods to analyze texts, but Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) has proved to be the most common technique. The analysis of linguistic patterns of political discourse shows that in the context of political speech events such as media interviews, politicians make a unique choice of lexical units, which can be interpreted as a manifestation of certain personality traits. However, despite the significance of the results, there are clear limitations to the use of computerized methodologies to make political discourse content-analysis, such as the limited interpretive capacity of software to understand pragmatic and contextual use of lexical units.

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Political discourse content analysis: a critical overview of a computerized text analysis program linguistic inquiry and word count (liwc)

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promote political conspiracies in the United States, in stark contrast with humans who focus on public health concerns.

What types of COVID-19 conspiracies are populated by Twitter bots?

Background: False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading on the web since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Antivaccine activists have also begun to use platforms such as Twitter to promote their views. To properly understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media, it is of great importance to gather the relevant data.
Objective: In this paper, we describe a data set of Twitter posts and Twitter accounts that publicly exhibit a strong antivaccine stance. The data set is made available to the research community via our AvaxTweets data set GitHub repository. We characterize the collected accounts in terms of prominent hashtags, shared news sources, and most likely political leaning.
Methods: We started the ongoing data collection on October 18, 2020, leveraging the Twitter streaming application programming interface (API) to follow a set of specific antivaccine-related keywords. Then, we collected the historical tweets of the set of accounts that engaged in spreading antivaccination narratives between October 2020 and December 2020, leveraging the Academic Track Twitter API. The political leaning of the accounts was estimated by measuring the political bias of the media outlets they shared.
Results: We gathered two curated Twitter data collections and made them publicly available: (1) a streaming keyword–centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and (2) a historical account–level data collection with more than 135 million tweets. The accounts engaged in the antivaccination narratives lean to the right (conservative) direction of the political spectrum. The vaccine hesitancy is fueled by misinformation originating from websites with already questionable credibility.
Conclusions: The vaccine-related misinformation on social media may exacerbate the levels of vaccine hesitancy, hampering progress toward vaccine-induced herd immunity, and could potentially increase the number of infections related to new COVID-19 variants. For these reasons, understanding vaccine hesitancy through the lens of social media is of paramount importance. Because data access is the first obstacle to attain this goal, we published a data set that can be used in studying antivaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy.

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Dataset of Anti-vaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation and Conspiracies.

Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which greatly limit their applications. In this paper we propose a framework that uses minimal account metadata, enabling efficient analysis that scales up to handle the full stream of public tweets of Twitter in real time. To ensure model accuracy, we build a rich collection of labeled datasets for training and validation. We deploy a strict validation system so that model performance on unseen datasets is also optimized, in addition to traditional cross-validation. We find that strategically selecting a subset of training data yields better model accuracy and generalization than exhaustively training on all available data. Thanks to the simplicity of the proposed model, its logic can be interpreted to provide insights into social bot characteristics.

/pdf/scalable-and-generalizable-social-bot-detection-through-data-3mvve34k1m.pdf

Scalable and Generalizable Social Bot Detection through Data Selection.

Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during the 2018 US midterm elections and analyze social bot activity and interactions with humans. We collected 2.6 million tweets for 42 days around the election day from nearly 1 million users. We use the collected tweets to answer three research questions: (i) Do social bots lean and behave according to a political ideology? (ii) Can we observe different strategies among liberal and conservative bots? (iii) How effective are bot strategies in engaging humans? We show that social bots can be accurately classified according to their political leaning and behave accordingly. Conservative bots share most of the topics of discussion with their human counterparts, while liberal bots show less overlap and a more inflammatory attitude. We studied bot interactions with humans and observed different strategies. Finally, we measured bots embeddedness in the social network and the extent of human engagement with each group of bots. Results show that conservative bots are more deeply embedded in the social network and more effective than liberal bots at exerting influence on humans.

/pdf/red-bots-do-it-better-comparative-analysis-of-social-bot-2cgewjyyln.pdf

Red Bots Do It Better:Comparative Analysis of Social Bot Partisan Behavior

Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during the 2018 US midterm elections and analyze social bot activity and interactions with humans. We collected 2.6 million tweets for 42 days around the election day from nearly 1 million users. We use the collected tweets to answer three research questions: (i) Do social bots lean and behave according to a political ideology? (ii) Can we observe different strategies among liberal and conservative bots? (iii) How effective are bot strategies? We show that social bots can be accurately classified according to their political leaning and behave accordingly. Conservative bots share most of the topics of discussion with their human counterparts, while liberal bots show less overlap and a more inflammatory attitude. We studied bot interactions with humans and observed different strategies. Finally, we measured bots embeddedness in the social network and the effectiveness of their activities. Results show that conservative bots are more deeply embedded in the social network and more effective than liberal bots at exerting influence on humans.

Red Bots Do It Better: Comparative Analysis of Social Bot Partisan Behavior

Online social media have become one of the main communication platforms for political discussion. The online ecosystem, however, does not only include human users but has given a space to an increasing number of automated accounts, referred to as bots, extensively used to spread messages and manipulate the narratives others are exposed to. Although social media service providers put increasing efforts to protect their platforms, malicious bot accounts continuously evolve to escape detection. In this work, we monitored the activity of almost 245K accounts engaged in the Twitter political discussion during the last two U.S. voting events. We identified approximately 31K bots and characterized their activity in contrast with humans. We show that, in the 2018 midterms, bots changed the volume and the temporal dynamics of their online activity to better mimic humans and avoid detection. Our findings highlight the mutable nature of bots and illustrate the challenges to forecast their evolution.

/pdf/evolution-of-bot-and-human-behavior-during-elections-1x5hvciind.pdf

Evolution of bot and human behavior during elections

One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population’s trust in the electoral system of choosing a representative government. In view of the well documented issues of the 2016 US Presidential election, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the 2018 US Midterm elections looking specifically for voter fraud or suppression. The Midterm election occurs in the middle of a 4 year presidential term. For the 2018 midterms, 35 Senators and all the 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for re-election, thus, every congressional district and practically every state had a federal election. In order to collect election related tweets, we analyzed Twitter during the month prior to, and the two weeks following, the November 6, 2018 election day. In a targeted analysis to detect statistical anomalies or election interference, we identified several biases that can lead to wrong conclusions. Specifically, we looked for divergence between actual voting outcomes and instances of the #ivoted hashtag on the election day. This analysis highlighted three states of concern: New York, California, and Texas. We repeated our analysis discarding malicious accounts, such as social bots. Upon further inspection and against a backdrop of collected general election-related tweets, we identified some confounding factors, such as population bias, or bot and political ideology inference, that can lead to false conclusions. We conclude by providing an in-depth discussion of the perils and challenges of using social media data to explore questions about election manipulation.

/pdf/perils-and-challenges-of-social-media-and-election-1h2337otvx.pdf

Perils and Challenges of Social Media and Election Manipulation Analysis: The 2018 US Midterms

The integrity of democratic political discourse is at the core to guarantee free and fair elections. With social media often dictating the tones and trends of politics-related discussion, it is of paramount important to be able to study online chatter, especially in the run up to important voting events, like in the case of the upcoming November 3, 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Limited access to social media data is often the first barrier to impede, hinder, or slow down progress, and ultimately our understanding of online political discourse. To mitigate this issue and try to empower the Computational Social Science research community, we decided to publicly release a massive-scale, longitudinal dataset of U.S. politics- and election-related tweets. This multilingual dataset that we have been collecting for over one year encompasses hundreds of millions of tweets and tracks all salient U.S. politics trends, actors, and events between 2019 and 2020. It predates and spans the whole period of Republican and Democratic primaries, with real-time tracking of all presidential contenders of both sides of the isle. After that, it focuses on presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Our dataset release is curated, documented and will be constantly updated on a weekly-basis, until the November 3, 2020 election and beyond. We hope that the academic community, computational journalists, and research practitioners alike will all take advantage of our dataset to study relevant scientific and social issues, including problems like misinformation, information manipulation, interference, and distortion of online political discourse that have been prevalent in the context of recent election events in the United States and worldwide. 
Our dataset is available at: this https URL

Ashok Deb

Papers

Red Bots Do It Better:Comparative Analysis of Social Bot Partisan Behavior

Red Bots Do It Better: Comparative Analysis of Social Bot Partisan Behavior

Evolution of bot and human behavior during elections

Perils and Challenges of Social Media and Election Manipulation Analysis: The 2018 US Midterms

#Election2020: The First Public Twitter Dataset on the 2020 US Presidential Election