Partisanship, Propaganda and Post-Truth Politics: Quantifying Impact in Online Debate

Understand

The recent past has highlighted the influential role of social networks and online media in shaping public debate on current affairs and political issues.

• This paper is focused on studying the role of politically-motivated actors and their strategies for influencing and manipulating public opinion online: partisan media, state-backed propaganda, and post-truth politics.
• In particular, we present quantitative research on the presence and impact of these three `Ps' in online Twitter debates in two contexts: (i) the run up to the UK EU membership referendum (`Brexit'); and (ii) the information operations of Russia-backed online troll accounts.
• We first compare the impact of highly partisan versus mainstream media during the Brexit referendum, specifically comparing tweets by half a million `leave' and `remain' supporters.