Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Uncovering Information Operations On Twitter Using Natural Language Processing And The Dynamic Wavelet Fingerprint, Spencer Lee Kirn

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Information Operations (IO) are campaigns waged by covert, powerful entities to distort public discourse in a direction that is advantageous for them. It is the behaviors of the underlying networks that signal these campaigns in action, not the specific content they are posting. In this dissertation we introduce a social media analysis system that uncovers these behaviors by analyzing the specific post timings of underlying accounts and networks. The presented method first clusters tweets based on content using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Each of these clusters - referred to as topics - are plotted in time using the attached metadata …