Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem

For every man-made crisis event... we found evidence of alternative narratives, often shared by some of the same accounts and connected to some of the same online sites. These rumors had different “signatures” from other types of rumors... rose more slowly, and then they lingered, ebbing and flowing ... sustained participation by a set group of Twitter users ... rather than finite participation by a large number of users... high “domain diversity”... Several ... had a strong “botnet” presence...
alternative narrative rumors intersected with politicized content... network graphs that revealed connections between different Twitter accounts   and ... “communities” ... we were extremely confused by some of the intersections...
more than 80% of the alternative media domains) were cited for content explicitly supporting the alternative narratives... mainstream media were cited for factual accounts of the events, and then used as evidence by conspiracy theorists as they built these theories. ... demonstrates a vexing aspect of rumor-correcting in this context — that corrections often backfire..
data also provide insight into ... botnets... the most tweeted domain... was TheRealStrategy.com... almost all of the tweets ... generated by a computer program... operated hundreds of different accounts... similar profile descriptions ... photos stolen from other people online...
to be anti-globalist could include being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-corporation, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union... anti-globalism pulled together individuals (and ideologies) from both the right and the left ... much ... was also anti-Semitic...
Every domain ... promoting an alternative narrative of a shooting event also contained ... other conspiracy theories ... not all political ... vaccines, GMOs, and “chemtrails”... seeking information [one] might encounter an article ... that synthesized an article from a second website ... copied from a third ...may think they are getting information from many different sources when in fact they are getting information from the same or very similar sources, laundered through many different websites....
Russian disinformation strategies ... designed not to convince but to ...create “muddled thinking” ... a society who learns it cannot trust information can be easily controlled. ...
they have co-opted arguments about media literacy ... using them to support the propagation of alternative narratives ...
criticism of mainstream media ... aligned with a political agenda of anti-globalism ... connected to the political orientations and goals of the Trump administration. ... spread within an alternative media ecosystem that utilizes conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook hoax claims and old anti-Semitic narratives to attract readers... aren’t focused solely on U.S. far-right or alt-right content, but are also using alt-left content