b'@online{Zannettou_arXIv1901.05997,'b'\nTITLE = {Characterizing the Use of Images in State-Sponsored Information Warfare Operations by {R}ussian {Tr}olls on Twitter},\nAUTHOR = {Zannettou, Savvas and Caulfield, Tristan and Bradlyn, Barry and De Cristofaro, Emiliano and Stringhini, Gianluca and Blackburn, Jeremy},\nLANGUAGE = {eng},\nURL = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.05997},\nEPRINT = {1901.05997},\nEPRINTTYPE = {arXiv},\nYEAR = {2019},\nABSTRACT = {State-sponsored organizations are increasingly linked to efforts aimed to<br>exploit social media for information warfare and manipulating public opinion.<br>Typically, their activities rely on a number of social network accounts they<br>control, aka trolls, that post and interact with other users disguised as<br>"regular" users. These accounts often use images and memes, along with textual<br>content, in order to increase the engagement and the credibility of their<br>posts.<br> In this paper, we present the first study of images shared by state-sponsored<br>accounts by analyzing a ground truth dataset of 1.8M images posted to Twitter<br>by accounts controlled by the Russian Internet Research Agency. First, we<br>analyze the content of the images as well as their posting activity. Then,<br>using Hawkes Processes, we quantify their influence on popular Web communities<br>like Twitter, Reddit, 4chan\'s Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab,<br>with respect to the dissemination of images. We find that the extensive image<br>posting activity of Russian trolls coincides with real-world events (e.g., the<br>Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), and shed light on their targets as<br>well as the content disseminated via images. Finally, we show that the trolls<br>were more effective in disseminating politics-related imagery than other<br>images.<br>},\n}\n'