State-linked manipulated media in the time of Covid-19: a look at Iran
Date
2025-02-17
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Data & Policy
Abstract
What drives changes in the thematic focus of state-linked manipulated media? We study this question in relation to a long-running Iranian state-linked manipulated media campaign that was uncovered by Twitter in 2021. Using a variety of machine learning methods, we uncover and analyze how this manipulation campaign’s topical themes changed in relation to rising Covid-19 cases in Iran. By using the topics of the tweets in a novel way, we find that increases in domestic Covid-19 cases engendered a shift in Iran’s manipulated media focus away from Covid-19 themes and toward international finance- and investment-focused themes. These findings underscore (i) the potential for state-linked manipulated media campaigns to be used for diversionary purposes and (ii) the promise of machine learning methods for detecting such behaviors.
Description
This article was originally published in Data & Policy. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2024.96.
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Keywords
Covid-19, manipulated media, text-as-data, topic modeling, Twitter
Citation
Bagozzi BE, Balasubramanian K, Goel R and Parker C (2025). State-linked manipulated media in the time of Covid-19: a look at Iran. Data & Policy, 7: e19. doi:10.1017/dap.2024.96