Reticular Analysis of Discourse for Influence Indicators

RADII is a highly automated, user-driven toolkit that identifies Influence Indicators (IIs) and enables intelligence analysts to discover and characterize influence campaigns online, particularly in social media. An information campaign aims to impact a (fragment of) population by broadcasting a series of messages on social media platforms (Twitter, etc.) with the objective of changing beliefs and attitudes or to induce specific activities. The postings may come from multiple coordinated accounts and some of which may be bots. The messages are then reposted, commented on, or replied to by anyone who sees them. Some of the key indicators of influence campaigns (IIDs) include Agenda, Emotions, and Concerns. A campaign usually has an agenda and it is evidenced by the way it pushes certain topics into the public discourse; in other words attempts to control the discourse agenda. Our task is to detect such evidence as part of building the campaign model. Emotions are often used to drive certain points home, both positive and negative emotions can be invoked deliberately.

The RPI team is developing applications for Agenda and Emotion IIDs detection in Twitter and Reddit message streams. The following figures show the schematic design flowcharts of each detector. We exploit innovative sociolinguistic psycholinguistic properties of conversational language to detect evidence of agenda control and emotion-inducing language in online messages.