Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere
Kareem Darwish, Dimitar Alexandrov, Preslav Nakov, Yelena Mejova

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.
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Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
