Detecting Influence Campaigns Across Social Media Platforms
summary
A multi-year system called Information Tracer collects posts from five platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube), builds bipartite user–hashtag/URL graphs, applies interaction thresholds to expose principal actors, and extracts URLs for sandbox analysis that finds Android malware. A Brazil case traces the “Brazilian Spring” narrative to an early November post that later feeds the January 8 unrest, and a hate campaign cluster shows 60,000 vs 2,500 cumulative interactions; coordinated patterns reveal hashtag hijacking and monetization incentives.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:00Types of online coordinated campaigns
- 3:10Challenges in detecting coordinated campaigns
- 4:10I started to prototype a system to solve this problem
- 4:55Content is not enough, context matters
- 6:20How does Information Tracer work? (cont.)
- 7:45Political campaigns in the Global South
- 9:18Rioters on January 8th, 2023 at Brasília
- 11:05@RafaelFontana shares highly questionable content
- 11:39Nov. 6, 2022, the narrative spread to Facebook
- 12:15Dec. 30, the narrative was shared across platforms
- 13:03Remove low-count edges to find "principal actors"
- 14:47What can we learn about this campaign?
- 16:24Amber Heard settles defamation case against Johnny Depp
- 18:00Quantify the influence of different campaigns
- 20:00Pro Johnny Depp accounts have similar profiles
- 21:24We identified similar campaigns targeting Meghan
- 24:55identify coordinated actors
- 25:57extract URLs from coordinated actors
- 26:23find malware URLS!
- 26:54Putting it together: automated malware discovery
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