Coordinating Narratives Framework for cross-platform analysis in the 2021 US Capitol riots

Area of Science:

• Computational Social Science
• Network Analysis
• Disinformation Studies

Background:

• Disinformation campaigns on social media can incite offline violence.
• Understanding coordinated messaging is crucial for combating harmful narratives.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a general methodology for uncovering coordinated messaging on social media platforms.
• To analyze user posts on Parler and Twitter to detect disinformation networks.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of the Coordinating Narratives Framework.
• Construction of user-to-user coordination, user-to-text, and text-to-text similarity graphs.
• Analysis of textual similarity between posts on Parler and Twitter.

Main Results:

• Detection of coordinated user clusters posting similar disinformation narratives.
• Identification of networks supporting disinformation related to the U.S. 2020 elections and the Capitol riots.
• Extension of the methodology to identify similar messaging on Twitter.

Conclusions:

• The Coordinating Narratives Framework effectively identifies coordinated disinformation.
• The study highlights the role of social media in spreading election-related disinformation.
• The methodology can be applied to various platforms for disinformation analysis.