Our upcoming #CSCW2018 paper examining information operations on Twitter in the context of the ongoing civil war in Syria. In this work, we look at how Russian, Syrian and Iranian info ops were integrated into an online community of information activists. faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/cscw-W…
This paper focuses on the case of the “Aleppo Boy” (Omran Daqneesh) who was photographed after his family’s home was bombed in an airstrike conducted by Syrian or Russian forces in 2016 & who re-appeared on Syrian state television almost a year later. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omran_Daq…
The original (2016) photo of Omran served to garner attention to and sympathy for the Syrian people living in rebel held areas of the country, who were suffering impacts from military actions perpetrated by the Syrian government and their allies, including Russia.
Our paper describes how a seemingly “organic” online community worked to assemble and spread “undermining” narratives that sought to disrupt the prevailing narrative about Omran’s family and the causes of their suffering.
These actions served to sow doubt and create confusion about the causes and impacts of the civil war in Syria—likely serving to diffuse sympathy from Western audiences for the Syrian people and to demotivate action from Western governments.
We consider these info ops as collaborative work w/in an online crowd & conceptualize this “work” as not simply coordinated, but as an assemblage of diverse actors, driven by a variety of motivations, loosely collaborating in the production & propagation of strategic narratives.
This view extends previous descriptions of online info ops as perpetrated by armies of automated accounts (or “bots”) and factories full of paid trolls, and suggests a complex and in some ways organic system with emergent properties. Cultivation, rather than orchestration.
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