Political Elections Under (Social) Fire? Analysis and Detection of Propaganda on Twitter

TL;DR

This paper investigates the presence of foreign propaganda on Twitter during the German federal election, revealing US trolls' influence and developing a detector for automated bot accounts.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of foreign influence in European elections and introduces a novel detector for identifying automated Twitter accounts.

Findings

79 US trolls influenced the German election discourse

Discovered 2,414 previously unknown bots

Foreign influence campaigns target European elections

Abstract

For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the existence of external campaigns to light aiming at affecting the general political public opinion. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar influence on political elections can be observed in Europe as well. To this end, we use the past German federal election as an indicator and inspect the propaganda on Twitter, based on data from a period of 268 days. We find that 79 trolls from the US campaign have also acted upon the German federal election spreading right-wing views. Moreover, we develop a detector for finding automated behavior that enables us to identify 2,414 previously unknown bots.