Understanding the Role of Overt and Covert Online Communication in Information Operations
Abstract
This thesis combines regression, sentiment, and social network analysis to explore how Russian online media agencies, both overt and covert, affect online communication on Twitter when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercises occur. It explores the relations between the average sentiment of tweets and the activities of Russia's overt and covert online media agencies. The data source for this research is the Naval Postgraduate School's licensed Twitter archive and open-source information about the NATO exercises timeline. Publicly available lexicons of positive and negative terms helped to measure the sentiment in tweets. The thesis finds that Russias covert media agencies, such as the Internet Research Agency, have a great impact on and likelihood for changing the sentiment of network users about NATO than do the overt Russian media outlets. The sentiment during NATO exercises becomes more negative as the activity of Russian media organizations, whether covert or overt, increases. These conclusions suggest that close tracking and examination of the activities of Russia's online media agencies provide the necessary base for detecting ongoing information operations. Further refining of the analytical methods can deliver amore comprehensive outcome. These refinements could employ machine learning or natural language processing algorithms that can increase the precision of the sentiment measurement probability and timely identification of trolls' accounts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1173277
Entities
People
- Boyan I. Dimitrov
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School