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Online Monitoring of Large Events 2018 European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference Online Monitoring of Large Events Johan Fernquist and Lisa Kaati Decision Support Systems Swedish Defence Research Agency Kista, Sweden fi[email protected] Abstract—In this paper, we describe an approach that can Several different analysis methods have been used when be used to monitor activity online that concerns large events. studying elections and online activity. Researchers at the We propose six different tasks that can be used separately or Oxford Internet Institute have developed one such approach. in combination. The different tasks include analyzing messages from various actors, understanding the impact of messages to The approach includes analysis of what kind of information receivers, studying online discussions, analyzing hate and threats that is shared on social media and how bots are used to directed towards people and threats towards the execution of manipulate public opinion. A study describing the Swedish the large event and finally if there are any ongoing influential general election on Twitter is described in [7]. The study operations directed towards the general public. measures the amount of junk news shared on social media on To illustrate how the approach can be used, we provide Twitter before the Swedish election. The results show that the some examples of the different steps when monitoring online environments a few months before the Swedish general election amount of shared junk news is higher than any other European in 2018. country that has been studied. Index Terms—monitoring, social media, intelligence, threat, Another approach that also focuses on Twitter and elections hate, elections is described in [10]. Three elections are studied with the focus to predict the outcome of elections in India, Pakistan, and I. INTRODUCTION Malaysia. The study concludes that sentiment analysis using Monitoring online environments for security reasons be- machine learning was the most accurate predictor of election comes more and more important due to the increased use of outcomes of the methods used. social media. However, monitoring online environments are A. A method to monitor social media difficult since it usually requires a lot of manual resources to provide a functional and useful analysis. One of the reasons for In this paper, we describe a method to monitor online this is the large amounts of available data and the difficulties discussions, reactions, and impact in conjunction with events to decide what kind of analysis that should be done and what that take place in the real world. One of the benefits of using digital environments the analysis should focus on. techniques for analyzing social media is that it can be used to There are many different technologies that can aid analysts make the analysis more objective and also provide support on in their work. One of the most well-known fields is called what human analysts should focus on. sentiment analysis and opinion mining where the goal is to A systematic approach to monitoring online aspects could analyze peoples opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, be beneficial for many researchers, analysts and data scientists. and emotions from written language [12]. However, many First of all, it provides a framework for what to study that, of other approaches and technologies can be used. Examples of course, can be extended. Secondly, it makes comparisons of other technologies that can be used for intelligence analysis the results possible. This means that in some cases it would be are described in [3]. possible to compare the results between different events in the same country and perhaps also compare the results between Social media provides researchers as well as law enforce- different countries. One of the reasons for developing this ment with large amounts of data and the ability to get insights method was the lack of a structured way to use technology into how different digital groups express themselves, evolve to monitor digital aspects of large events among Swedish law and respond to events in the real world. Computer-assisted enforcement. technologies are nowadays not only used by computer scientist but also by social scientist [1]. However, in many aspects, We propose six different task for analyzing online envi- social media is challenging to analyze. In many cases, it ronments that can be used separately or in combination. The requires social scientists and computer scientists to work different tasks include analysis of messages from different together. It is also the case that many technologies need labeled actors, the impact of such messages on the receivers, how to training data to perform reasonably well and this requires study online discussions, analyzing hate and threats directed human resources. towards people as well as towards the execution of the event and if there are any ongoing influential operations directed This research is financed by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. towards the general public. To illustrate how the method can 978-1-5386-9400-8/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 47 DOI 10.1109/EISIC.2018.00015 be used, we provide some examples of how the different steps analyzed) a selection of relevant articles that can be manually are used when monitoring some different online environment studied is obtained. This approach will only provide the before the Swedish general election in 2018. articles that got most frequently shared. The number of articles that are selected for a manual analysis depends on the human B. Outline resources. In Section II, we introduce and motivate six steps that can be used when monitoring and analyzing online aspects B. Step 2: Editorial impact of an event. Both methodological and technological aspects The editorial impact or how the public responds to the are described. In Section III we show some examples of how editorial material is of interest to study since it can provide each of the six steps was used to monitor the Swedish general information about public opinion. To get an understanding of election. We do not provide a full analysis of the Swedish the impact of the editorial material feelings expressed by user- election, the results presented here should be seen as examples generated comments on the editorial material can be studied. of how the suggested steps can be used in a real case. Finally, This kind of analysis provides an estimation of the reactions Section IV provides a discussion of the method and some on the editorial material. directions for future work. Studying emotions in the commentary fields is one way to reveals the impact of editorial messages. Emotions are II. MONITORING LARGE EVENTS ONLINE an important window for insight into one’s thoughts and The aim with this work is to describe an approach to monitor behaviors. Suggestions of emotions to study are anxiety and several different aspects of an event by analyzing editorial anger. Even though violence is not an emotion, it can still be material from various actors, user-generated comments that relevant to study since it is a behavior that can be seen as can be seen as a reaction to the editorial material, online a reaction to the emotions that we study. Anyone can show discussion forums, and Twitter. Each source needs to be anxiety and anger, but different individuals may have quite analyzed independently due to the differences in how and different levels of anger in response to one and the same why the data was produced and the format of the data. The situation. These individual differences in how we respond to approach is divided into six different tasks. Each task can be a situation make us unique. For that reason, emotions can be performed on a number of different digital environments. The seen as part of an individual’s characteristic traits, just like tasks we suggest are: the personality, or perhaps as part of someone’s personality. 1) Editorial messages An interesting difference is that emotions are expressed almost 2) Editorial impact exclusively in response to something in the environment. 3) Online discussions To study emotions, a keyword-based analysis of text can 4) Hate and threats be used. There are many limits using dictionary-based ap- 5) Threats towards execution of the event proaches. For example, it is not possible to detect linguistic 6) Influential operations nuances such as irony or sarcasm. Another drawback of using Each task is described in detail below. dictionaries is that words are context dependent. One word can have very different meanings, depending on how and where it A. Step 1: Editorial messages is used. To create good dictionaries, each dictionary containing In conjunction with any significant event, different kinds the keywords related to each category that is analyzed should of news media will inform as well as influencing people be constructed by human experts (psychologist and computer through the editorial material. There are many different ways scientist). In order to improve the coverage of the dictionaries, to influence an audience with editorial material. Producing and a word embedding can be used to suggest complementary spreading junk news and fake news is perhaps the most well- terms to the experts. This can be done by simply computing known way to influence the public. However, the editorial the 15 nearest neighbors in the embedding space to each term material does not have to be direct lies or untruthful - the in the dictionaries. For each term suggestion, the expert has actual choice of what editorial material to publish influences the choice to either include or reject the term suggestion. the readers and in some cases also the public opinion. When studying editorial impact the comments of the most To get an understanding of what kind of editorial messages shared articles for the different news sites can be used.
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