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Description
It is becoming increasingly important to understand Twitter as a public space that facilitates political discourse.
Unfortunately, this space is often under attack by organized groups that try to abuse the functionalities of the platform for purposes of spreading political propaganda. This kind of organized behavior goes against Twitter’s terms of service, but it is very hard to detect using conventional, automatized efforts and the network itself is doing too little to help suppress it—especially on a market as small as Slovenia. Combined with the lack of proper legislation it is becoming imperative that civil society helps with the oversight and watchdog efforts.
Project Twitter brigades will connect experts in the field of data mining (Danes je nov dan) and investigative journalism (Pod črto) in order to perform an analysis of the Slovenian Twitter network. The results of the analysis will be interpreted and presented in the form of a publicly accessible piece of investigative journalism, published online on the Pod črto website. The results of the analysis will also be forwarded to Twitter along with a takedown request for the abusive profiles.
The removal of the propaganda network from the political discourse on Twitter will help quell the inflamed political atmosphere, facilitate a more civil and fair debate, and offer existing and potential new users of the network a less discriminatory environment for public expression of opinion and thought.
All the policy markers are relevant in this project because part of the political discourse on Twitter is also hate speech, directed directly towards (or against) women, Roma and other vulnerable groups.
Summary of project results
Twitter is an important online public space where political conversations and debates take place. Unfortunately, Twitter has been increasingly exploited as a tool to spread political propaganda by a large number of fake profiles run by organized groups of people. Such profiles pretend to be real users; they attack and intimidate other users on Twitter while promoting and sharing propaganda, thus trying to redirect or sabotage political discussions. Such organized operation violates the Twitter rules and policies, but is difficult to detect by conventional methods. Moreover, Twitter itself does very little to prevent such abuses – especially in small markets such as Slovenia. Since there is still no legislation to prevent such abuse of social networks, we decided to tackle the problem with our project.
The Twitter Brigades project will bring together experts in data analysis (Danes je nov dan) and investigative reporting (Pod črto). Together they will investigate the propaganda Twitter network in Slovenia. The results of the research will be published on the website Pod črto and thus accessible to the general public. The results of the analysis, i.e. detected fake profiles, will also be sent to Twitter with a request to delete the profiles.
Removing the controversial propaganda network from Twitter will help cool the heated political climate, allow for a more civilized and balanced debate, and offer Twitter users a less hostile environment to express their opinions.
The project completed all of its activities. The project completed one result (media representation of the project) in its entirety and one result (closing twitter accounts) partially.