Developing and Testing a Multidisciplinary, Theoretical Model of Narrative Propagation
Abstract
Influence campaigns, such as the propagation of fake news that originate with adversaries, are a problem in the United States and in"" NATO countries. False stories with specific embedded narratives are propagated to enrage, excite, and change behavior. This challen""ge and the subsequent solutions are multidisciplinary, touching on various aspects of human behavior,cognition, and interaction. Th"e goal of this project is to identify and explore factors that can influence narratives to propagate in a community versus be relati"vely ignored. Specifically, the performer will, across the different phases of the project: (1) develop a top-downmultidisciplinary"" social science theoretical model that identifies the relevant factors, including important moderators and mitigators (e.g., amplifi""ers, suppressors), of online narrative propagation; (2) conduct bottom-up qualitative research of a sample of fake news stories to i""dentify possible additional factors, which are then added to the model created in #1; (3) create quantifiable metrics of those facto"rs and of successful and unsuccessful propagation; and (4)assess these metrics in a sample of successful and unsuccessful fake news" narratives derived from Russian and English blogs. Should the research be continued into FY19, as an optional expansion the perform"er will (5) test the metrics on a sufficiently large sample of fake news stories so as to assess the validity of the combined model.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 29, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141712962
Entities
People
- Susannah Paletz
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Maryland