Detecting Systematic Intervention in Online Discourse in or to Gain Insight onto Government Priorities

As authoritarian leaders take action to control online content, they leave behind an outline of their priorities and prove a willingness to act. When collected and analyzed at scale, online intervention can be used to assess the concerns of the intervening government across several policy categories, including military affairs and foreign policy. In our Phase I equivalent research, we established a replicable methodology and designed a basic software architecture for identifying and collecting content removed by hand by foreign government censors. In Phase II we propose to develop a methodology for collecting official and unofficial fabricated online content a foreign country that is correlated to real world events. We will look to mine these content streams for policy-relevant information as well as regional patterns. The Phase II Option proposes expanding at least one of the methodologies for collecting manipulated content from a second country where our research indicates the government employs certain similar media manipulation methods to the first country for study.