Measuring Manipulation in Audiences Targeted by Coordinated Social Media Dissemination Tactics

The information environment has become a new battlefield for adversaries of the United States and its allies. Coordinated campaigns have been waged to radicalize, incite division, inflame, influence elections and public opinion on a variety of issues. These campaigns have weaponized social media by forming networks of synthetic accounts (botnets) which spread mis/disinformation, polarize groups and spread malicious content. The goal of this research is to analyze, characterize and quantify manipulation of audiences in social media using emotion based tactics. The research is at the intersection of natural language processing techniques to detect nuanced emotions in social media posts, detecting bot networks and understanding their intent and estimating the emotional response to posts intended to manipulate. Ultimately, our goal is to understand if and how audiences are manipulated by coordinated dissemination of content intended to incite.