The United States has a pressing capability gap in its ability to detect
malign or subversive information campaigns in time to respond to
them before these efforts substantially influence the attitudes and
behaviors of large audiences. While there is ongoing research attempting to detect parts of such specific campaigns (e.g., compromised
accounts, “fake news” stories), this report addresses a novel method to
detect whole efforts.
As a proof of concept to detecting malign or subversive information campaigns over social media, we adapted an existing social
media analysis method, combining network analysis and text analysis to map out, visualize, and understand the communities interacting on social media. This method works at scale. It allows analysts
to look for patterns of disinformation in data sets that are too large
for human qualitative analysis, reducing an enormous data set into
smaller/denser data sets wherein a faint disinformation signal can be
detected.
We examined whether Russia and its agents might have used
the Russian hosting of the 2018 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup as a launching point for malign
and subversive information efforts. To do so, we analyzed approximately 69 million tweets—in English, French, and Russian—about
the 2018 World Cup in the month before and the month after the
Cup.1