Thursday, April 20, 2023, 2pm
The information environment encompasses various organizations, individuals, and systems that deal with information, with three interconnected dimensions: physical, informational, and cognitive. Today’s internet plays a crucial role in the information environment, where information can be disseminated widely through viral tweets, controlled via state censor protocols, or suppressed through government internet censorship. State actors are leveraging social networks for information campaigns, making it imperative to understand who is disseminating what to whom. However, existing research on state-sponsored campaigns, particularly related to China’s activities, faces challenges due to proprietary data restrictions, resource constraints, and the anonymous nature of many public forums, resulting in a gap in identifying state-sponsored inauthentic behavior on social media.
To address this research gap, my thesis leverages computational and network science methods with political and sociological groundings to identify and characterize state actor campaigns within the information environment. At the singular campaign level, I use the network structure of a campaign to identify key actors and their functions across different types of information campaigns. I then employ information theory methods to analyze how China’s dialogue towards regional countries in the area has shifted over time, examining the aggregated effects of campaign narratives. Furthermore, I expand the research by utilizing a social cybersecurity framework to map out how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses information maneuvers to shape the information environment. To account for the technical means that state actors may use to manipulate web browser results, particularly for websites that are frequently used in information campaigns, I employ network structures of China’s top website domains to identify common PRC search engine optimization techniques that artificially boost a given site’s browser visibility. Lastly, I aggregate my findings by expanding a decision-making game designed for analysts who are studying how different types of actors manipulate the social media domain. I integrate key measurements in the synthetic creation of a PRC information campaign and validate generated data. These contributions enhance the understanding of state-sponsored information campaigns and provide valuable tools to researchers in the field.
Thesis Committee:
Kathleen M. Carley (Chair)
Patrick Park,
John Chin
Matthew Benigni (US Army Futures Command)
In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.