Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narrative about the Russo-Ukrainian War on Reddit
Published in 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2023), 2023
Recommended citation: Hanley, Hans W. A., Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. "Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narrative about the Russo-Ukrainian War on Reddit." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 17. 2023. https://www.hanshanley.com/files/happenstance.pdf
In this work, we study the coordinated information campaign to understand the most prominent disinformation narratives touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences. To do this, we first perform sentence-level topic analysis using the large-language model MPNet on articles published by nine different Russian disinformation websites and the new Russian “fact-checking” website waronfakes. After analyzing the set of Russian information narratives, we analyze their correspondence with narratives and topics of discussion on the r/Russia and 10 other political subreddits