2018 Social Media and Democracy Research Grants
Applicant Information
Ariel V. Sheen
Innovation and Technology Management Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana Colombia
Project Details
The Social Media Behavior of Venezuelan State Media: A Case Study on TeleSUR English
Priority Topics
Disinformation, Polarization and Election Integrity, Civic Engagement
Dataset(s)
Facebook URL Shares Dataset
Keywords
Political Polarization, Disinformation, Social Media, Democracy, Influence
Countries of Research
United States
Disciplinary Focus
Communications, Political science and government
Project Length
6 Months
Amount Requested
$49999.00
Project Abstract
TeleSUR English is a media project of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments to promote their desire for a multi-polar world order. Their main news outlet has over 600,000 people listed as following it on Facebook, while their other properties, consisting of cultural, historical and current-event commentary, raises the numbers of followers they have to nearly a million. Their combined content on YouTube has been viewed in excess of 20 million times.
Over the four year course of their operations, TeleSUR English has partnered with other state-owned foreign language news media outlets such as Russia’s RT, Iran’s HispanTV, Qatar’s AJ+ and China’s CCTV.
This project will use quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Venezuela’s government’s English language media operations to answer specific questions such as:
- To what extent were specific demographics and geographic areas targeted by TeleSUR?
- What were the defining attributes of the political content and areas targeted by TeleSUR English?
- What connections can be made between Russian and Venezuelan state media operations to influence the American electorate?
- How can Venezuela’s social media actions affect the way Americans build common sense, and how does the spread of strategic political content lead to political fragmentation?
It is expected that the final results of the investigation will show that Venezuela sought to increase political polarization through the targeted promotion of information aligned with specific political sector interests and thus demobilizing its readers from the political process rather than categorically promoting the public interest. Other data set will
Practical Importance of Project
Charting the efforts of Venezuela’s social and news media projects to influence the political values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of groups and individuals within the United States electorate is of practical importance for consideration by a wide variet of public and private policy makers.
Showing the connection of Russia’s state media to Venezuela’s activities is also important for illustrating the manner in which it is is possible for small groups of skilled people to accelerate actual or perceived political polarization; spread disinformation or propaganda; facilitate political actions that range from legal to illegal and, overall, impact American elections.
Visualizing the scope and shape of this particular iteration of coordinated inauthentic behavior and it’s relation to In Real Life (IRL) action will help readers of the project better understand how to exercise media literacy skills and help shape future conversations about the relationship between social media and democracy. Furthermore, it will provide coders new means of adapting existent algorithms so as to be able to more effectively identify coordinated inauthentic behavior on the Facebook.
Expected Outcome of Project
This project will produce a minimum of 30 graphic visualizations based on Facebook data, data compiled from public records, subscription based data sets, of APIs as needed.
These graphics will be packaged together with historical/technical context and analytical writing to promote media literacy and showcase new knowledge as to how TeleSUR English/Venezuela seeks to influence American politics as well as their links to Russian media on Medium. This will then be promoted via outreach to media outlets that have previously published on similar themes as well as via influencer outreach.
Ethical and Privacy Considerations
The ethical and privacy considerations evidenced in the research in this vein thus far produced by the Digital Media Research Labs, the Atlantic Council and the Kings Centre for Strategic Communication will be the guide for our our work. With the exception of TeleSUR English, RT, Sputnik and other employees or associated accounts engaging in public behavior, all individual users privacy will be maintained by illustrating only general, numerical patterns of event behavior. Absolutely no private individual Facebook, Twitter or other social media users will be named in order to prevent another @Ian56789 incident.