Tracking Tweets

In today’s age of heightened political turbulence and accessibility to digital communication, it can be difficult to discern fact from fake news. The Media Forensics Hub Creative Inquiry project, mentored by Dr. Patrick Warren from the Department of Economics and Dr. Darren Linvill from the Department of Communication, is combating misinformation through social media observation, analysis and action.

The Media Forensics Hub at the Watt Family Innovation Center was established in April 2020 with funding from the South Carolina Research Authority. The Creative Inquiry project evolved from the hub to further engage students in media forensics and the concept of inauthenticity of media. Linvill, the lead researcher at The Media Forensics Hub, spearheads the Creative Inquiry project and collaborates with a team of faculty co-mentors from the College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences, the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business and the Watt Family Innovation Center.

Throughout the school year, the Creative Inquiry students worked together to investigate the suspected inauthenticity surrounding a network of Twitter accounts affiliated with Muhammad Shojaee, a religious leader in Tehran, Iran. “Combined with my interest in interdisciplinary political science, psychology and computer science, [this CI] is a perfect fit to learn a lot about something I’m curious about in a low stress and collaborative environment,” Jack Taylor, a junior economics and mathematics double major, said.

The Creative Inquiry team discovered that there are more ways to decipher tweets than just translating the text from Arabic (or other Middle Eastern languages) to English. Students observed the frequency of tweets, profile photos, the type of device posts originate from and who is in the network of the accounts. Resources such as Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit, NodeXL (network analysis software) and Maltego (open-source intelligence and forensics software) are key resources for the Creative Inquiry team’s research, from gathering superficial information to uncovering more complex details. Each tool has a different specialty, “They [can help us] find a network between accounts and scrub an account’s timeline for keywords and links to others,” Taylor said. The team is confident that their efforts will be able to expose inauthentic accounts and uncover what is true and what is not surrounding stories on social media.

While a human runs a social media account, there are also a few other possibilities as to who or what is really behind the account. “Some of these accounts are automated bots and other times it is run by people overseas. You can hire people very cheaply to run social media accounts,” Linvill said. It gets especially tricky when cyborg accounts are involved. They can be much harder to identify because they are both human and computer-run accounts. The Media Forensics Creative Inquiry team hypothesizes that extremist groups use marketing firms to run inauthentic social media accounts to boost their media and messaging; however, the challenge is finding the evidence to support this hypothesis.

Year after year, technological advancements allow disinformation tactics and strategies to evolve, forcing researchers to keep up with the changes. “There have been some times when it seemed like we weren’t making headway or were going to hit a dead end. Luckily, however, the nature of the CI and the expertise of the professors and graduate student mentor, Stephen Sheffield, allowed us to adapt and turn our setbacks into something that was still of substance,” Taylor said. The Creative Inquiry team’s final report will be available to other researchers and they hope will provide evidence that these accounts are violating Twitter community guidelines and spreading disinformation which will potentially shut down these Twitter accounts.