Political Data Science

The UKR Government is asking to support its information warfare. Next step in #cyberwarfare! In the conflict in Ukraine social media is manipulated by probably all conflict parties. As discussed in these former posts here and here , #social botnets are one instrument that is in use. Now the Ukrainian Government goes a step further: On the webpage i-army.org (which looks quite official) they ask all Ukrainians to join a cyberarmy. The webpage says that you will get daily tasks to support Ukrainian information warfare, once you have registered.  Welcome to cyber warfare! A whois request leads to the US-corporation "Privacy Protection" which is protecting the information about the owner of the domain... Here is the whois, anyway: Domain Name:I-ARMY.ORG Domain ID: D175247051-LROR Creation Date: 2015-02-07T11:12:11Z Updated Date: 2015-04-09T03:46:00Z Registry Expiry Date: 2016-02-07T11:12:11Z Sponsoring Registrar:PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com (R27-...

Here are some more news about the #SocialBots in the Ukraine conflict. To show their activity, I created a #heatmap. As described in the last post we are analysing a social botnet that is "engaged" in the Ukraine conflict. To understand what is going on, I build a heatmap showing how active the bots are on each day. We can compare this map with the general activity on Twitter around the hashtag #Ukraine. There seems to be  no striking relation - at least in the short period we have data for. My guess is that the decrease in bot-activity was caused by counter-measures of Twitter... Oh yes, and here comes the R-code: (remember how to deal with " Twitter-dates "!) ### Descriptive ukraineAll source ( "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iascchen/VisHealth/master/R/calendarHeat.R" )   # Remeber to change time locale, if you are not in english Sys.setlocale ( "LC_TIME" , "English" ) ukraineAll$userDate <- as.Date ( ...

@ dietmarja: A huge amount of data in social networks like Twitter is not generated by humans but by automatic programs (bots). "Twitter is a good way for political scientists to find out what the people really think." That's what many researchers think... But Twitter can easily be manipulated. A year ago, I found a huge social botnet on Twitter, active in Ukraine. Research is still going on and I teamed up with my colleague Dietmar Janetzko to analyze this network. Due to this cooperation, first results are now coming in. Check out this paper I am going to present at the #MPSA conference , Sunday next week: http://conference.mpsanet.org/papers/archive.aspx/2011/141456 It is in the panel “ The Kids are All Right: News from Unexpected Places ”. And here is a small video, where the first results are discussed (in German): I will give you more information about the research in the posts to come. As a little teaser, here is an #R-graphic showing the ...