From this individual’s dissertation:

“Information operations – efforts to distort the information ecosystem through methods such as the dissemination of disinformation in efforts to influence opinions or actions of individuals, governments or publics – are long-established methods of intelligence agencies and the military.

However, the advent of social media has led to an era of renewed opportunity: the features and affordances of social media platforms, such as the interconnected social networks, abundance of user data, ability for any user to produce and disseminate content, and algorithm-driven feeds means that they are easier to deploy, and to deploy at scale. Disinformation (and information operations as the process of disinforming) disrupt decision-making, erode trust in institutions such as the media and government, and cumulatively undermine democratic processes.

Recent conceptualizations of information operations as they occur on social media, such as the Russian Internet Research Agency’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US Presidential Election, focus on the explicit coordination of inauthentic accounts. However, in this dissertation I will demonstrate that information operations are more complex – the distinction between the explicitly coordinated and organic aspects are blurred and the activities far more nuanced. Furthermore, despite increasing awareness and recent research there remain gaps in our understanding, including how strategic information operations and disinformation campaigns leverage the wider information ecosystem, taking shape on and across multiple websites and social media platforms.

From a perspective of human-computer interaction (HCI), and in particular computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), this dissertation aims to contribute to this body of research by presenting four distinct but related studies that collectively build a comprehensive understanding of the structure and dynamics of multi-platform online information operations, including the integration of government-controlled and alternative media, the roles of different social media platforms (i.e., how they are used in complementary ways), and the online collaborative ‘work’ that brings these aspects together and sustains the information operation over time.

Across the studies I adopt a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research techniques to ask questions of digital trace data (evidence of online user activities and interactions) collected from Twitter. I systematically examine both the online conversation on Twitter plus the wider ecosystem of news-publishing websites and social media platforms linked-to in tweets. The broad contribution of this work is the revelation and exploration of online information operations, specifically how information operations take shape on and across multiple websites and social media platforms, and the collaborative ‘work’ required to sustain them. Theoretically, based upon the empirical findings presented, I reconceptualize information operations as not solely the product of inauthentic coordinated behavior (orchestrated bots and trolls) but as also involving authentic (as in real, sincerely participating) actors that loosely collaborate in the production, synthesis, and mobilization of contested narratives that serve the strategic goals of the information operation. Methodologically, I contribute to a growing body of work in the area of disinformation and online activism that utilizes a mixed-method approach to research. And, based on my examination of a multi-platform information operation, I end with implications for social media platform policy.”