Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hanley, Hans W. A., Durumeric, Zakir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
author_facet Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
contents In response to disinformation and propaganda from Russian online media following the invasion of Ukraine, Russian media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik News were banned throughout Europe. To maintain viewership, many of these Russian outlets began to heavily promote their content on messaging services like Telegram. In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. Leveraging the foundational model MPNet, DP-means clustering, and Hawkes processes, we trace how narratives spread between news sites and Telegram channels. We show that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram but that they source material from the messaging platform. For example, across the websites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of articles discussed content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram. Finally, tracking the spread of individual topics, we measure the rate at which news outlets and Telegram channels disseminate content within the Russian media ecosystem, finding that websites like ura.news and Telegram channels such as @genshab are the most effective at disseminating their content.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_10856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram
Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
In response to disinformation and propaganda from Russian online media following the invasion of Ukraine, Russian media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik News were banned throughout Europe. To maintain viewership, many of these Russian outlets began to heavily promote their content on messaging services like Telegram. In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. Leveraging the foundational model MPNet, DP-means clustering, and Hawkes processes, we trace how narratives spread between news sites and Telegram channels. We show that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram but that they source material from the messaging platform. For example, across the websites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of articles discussed content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram. Finally, tracking the spread of individual topics, we measure the rate at which news outlets and Telegram channels disseminate content within the Russian media ecosystem, finding that websites like ura.news and Telegram channels such as @genshab are the most effective at disseminating their content.
title Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10856