Mapping the Dissemination of Russian Narratives on Social Networks in France

• In Event: Monitoring Digital Disinformation: Innovative Methods and Empirical Results

Abstract

Since the end of the 2000’s, Russia has been developing a strategy of influence based on deployment of media agencies targeting foreign countries online and on social networks. This strategy has raised major concerns in Western democracies. In Europe and in the U.S, the perception of a Russian informational threat has been hanging over every election since the Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., even though little evidence has been found about direct interference with democratic elections since. There is no question however that narratives produced by Russian news agencies (RT and Sputnik in France) have become increasingly popular on social networks and likely to influence public opinion and shape political debates.
This paper will present innovative methodologies to understand and map the dissemination of these narratives through social networks. This methodology is at a crossroad of geopolitics, computer science and mathematics. We collected data on Twitter on the month of August 2018 and from November 2018 to February 2019 based on a double approach by content and by actors and focused on two polemic subjects : the Benalla affair (involving Alexandre Benalla, the former security officer and deputy chief of staff to French President Emmanuel Macron) and the first four months of the Yellow vest protest movement. We used keywords to select tweets related to our subjects of interest (content) and collected all the tweets posted by a selection of accounts identified as being favorable to Russia (actors).
With the tools we developed we were able to detect four political communities on the Benalla affair. Our results show considerable levels of interaction between the far-right and the pro-Russian communities. We also showed that Russian state accounts have been very active during the Benalla case but unable to propagate their narrative outside of their own Twitter community (very low betweenness centrality score), invalidating the theory of an amplification of the Benalla affair by Russia on Twitter. Inversely, the content produced by Russia Today and Sputnik during the Yellow Vest movement disseminated throughout the entire network, where communities were split along traditional political lines.
In addition, we developed an innovative cartography to represent our results in a more accessible way than a graph and discussed the limitations of our methodology.

Authors

• Colin Gerard, University Paris 8

• Guilhem Marotte, French Institut of Geopolitics

• Loqman Salamatian, Geode