Coordinating Narratives Framework for cross-platform analysis in the 2021 US Capitol riots.

Abstract

Coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to influence social media users, potentially leading to offline violence. In this study, we introduce a general methodology to uncover coordinated messaging through an analysis of user posts on Parler. The proposed Coordinating Narratives Framework constructs a user-to-user coordination graph, which is induced by a user-to-text graph and a text-to-text similarity graph. The text-to-text graph is constructed based on the textual similarity of Parler and Twitter posts. We study three influential groups of users in the 6 January 2020 Capitol riots and detect networks of coordinated user clusters that post similar textual content in support of disinformation narratives related to the U.S. 2020 elections. We further extend our methodology to Twitter tweets to identify authors that share the same disinformation messaging as the aforementioned Parler user groups.