Identifying propaganda in global social media

摘要

Disclosed is a scalable method for automatically deriving the topics discussed most prevalently in unstructured, multilingual text, and simultaneously revealing which topics are more biased towards one or another ‘information space’. The concept of the ‘information space’ is derived from Russian strategic doctrine on information warfare; an example of an ‘information space’ would be the portion of social media in which the Russian language is used. The disclosed method leverages this concept, in conjunction with unsupervised multilingual machine learning, to determine, automatically and without any built-in bias or preconceived notions of what is important, which topics are more discussed, for example, in one language than another. An analyst's attention can then be focused on the most important differences between national discourses, and insight more quickly gained into the areas (both topics and geographic regions) in which propaganda of the sort envisaged in Russian strategic doctrine may be taking hold.