Analysing State-Backed Propaganda Websites: a New Dataset and Linguistic Study

Freddy Heppell, Kalina Bontcheva, Carolina Scarton


Abstract
This paper analyses two hitherto unstudied sites sharing state-backed disinformation, Reliable Recent News (rrn.world) and WarOnFakes (waronfakes.com), which publish content in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish. We describe our content acquisition methodology and perform cross-site unsupervised topic clustering on the resulting multilingual dataset. We also perform linguistic and temporal analysis of the web page translations and topics over time, and investigate articles with false publication dates. We make publicly available this new dataset of 14,053 articles, annotated with each language version, and additional metadata such as links and images. The main contribution of this paper for the NLP community is in the novel dataset which enables studies of disinformation networks, and the training of NLP tools for disinformation detection.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.349
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5729–5741
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.349
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.349
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Freddy Heppell, Kalina Bontcheva, and Carolina Scarton. 2023. Analysing State-Backed Propaganda Websites: a New Dataset and Linguistic Study. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5729–5741, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analysing State-Backed Propaganda Websites: a New Dataset and Linguistic Study (Heppell et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.349.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.349.mp4