Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash

Mareike Hartmann, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Isabelle Augenstein


Abstract
Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of information about this event on Twitter have focused on small, manually annotated datasets, or used proxys for data annotation. In this work, we examine to what extent text classifiers can be used to label data for subsequent content analysis, in particular we focus on predicting pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Twitter content related to the MH17 plane crash. Even though we find that a neural classifier improves over a hashtag based baseline, labeling pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian content with high precision remains a challenging problem. We provide an error analysis underlining the difficulty of the task and identify factors that might help improve classification in future work. Finally, we show how the classifier can facilitate the annotation task for human annotators.
Anthology ID:
D19-5006
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Anna Feldman, Giovanni Da San Martino, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Chris Brew, Chris Leberknight, Preslav Nakov
Venue:
NLP4IF
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
45–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5006
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-5006
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mareike Hartmann, Yevgeniy Golovchenko, and Isabelle Augenstein. 2019. Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda, pages 45–55, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash (Hartmann et al., NLP4IF 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5006.pdf
Code
 coastalcph/mh17