Challenges and Opportunities in Information Manipulation Detection: An Examination of Wartime Russian Media

Chan Young Park, Julia Mendelsohn, Anjalie Field, Yulia Tsvetkov


Abstract
NLP research on public opinion manipulation campaigns has primarily focused on detecting overt strategies such as fake news and disinformation. However, information manipulation in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war exemplifies how governments and media also employ more nuanced strategies. We release a new dataset, VoynaSlov, containing 38M+ posts from Russian media outlets on Twitter and VKontakte, as well as public activity and responses, immediately preceding and during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. We apply standard and recently-developed NLP models on VoynaSlov to examine agenda setting, framing, and priming, several strategies underlying information manipulation, and reveal variation across media outlet control, social media platform, and time. Our examination of these media effects and extensive discussion of current approaches’ limitations encourage further development of NLP models for understanding information manipulation in emerging crises, as well as other real-world and interdisciplinary tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.382
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5209–5235
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.382
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.382
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chan Young Park, Julia Mendelsohn, Anjalie Field, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2022. Challenges and Opportunities in Information Manipulation Detection: An Examination of Wartime Russian Media. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 5209–5235, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges and Opportunities in Information Manipulation Detection: An Examination of Wartime Russian Media (Park et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.382.pdf