Using Social Media to Extract Information About Chemical Weapons Incidents: A Methodology and Demonstration of Concept from the Civil War in Syria

Abstract

Policymakers across the federal government have begun to recognize the potential of social media as a source of information and have commissioned studies to explore how social media can improve disaster situational awareness, influence public opinion, augment traditional data sources, and counter disinformation. In this project, we developed an approach for analyzing social media data to derive insights about chemical incidents and conducted a proof of concept of that approach by applying it to the case of chemical weapons employment in Syria between 2017 and 2018. In this report, we describe a procedure for analyzing chemical weapons incidents and apply that method to the test case of chemical weapons use in the Syrian Civil War.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2022
Accession Number
AD1164200

Entities

People

  • Gregory W. Fauerbach
  • Jenny Oberholtzer
  • Joshua Mendelsohn
  • Natasha Lander
  • Paul S. Steinberg
  • Stephanie Young
  • Yousuf Abdelfatah

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School
  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Chemical Warfare Agents
  • Chemical Weapons
  • Computational Science
  • Computers
  • Data Analysis
  • Employment
  • Health Services
  • Information Operations
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • International Organizations
  • Machine Learning
  • Medical Personnel
  • National Security
  • Online Communications
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Societies

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Political Violence and Terrorism Studies.