Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'seminar users' on Arabic Twitter, develops a framework to identify them with high accuracy, and demonstrates their significant influence in political discourse, with potential applicability across languages.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel framework for detecting propaganda-supporting users called seminar users, effective across languages and regions, with a case study on political influence.

Findings

Framework achieves 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall.

Seminar users constitute 25% of engaged users and produce nearly a third of on-topic tweets.

Seminar users effectively influence discourse through coordinated campaigns.

Abstract

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.