Dataset of Propaganda Techniques of the State-Sponsored Information Operation of the People's Republic of China

The digital media, identified as computational propaganda provides a pathway for propaganda to expand its reach without limit. State-backed propaganda aims to shape the audiences' cognition toward entities in favor of a certain political party or authority. Furthermore, it has become part of modern information warfare used in order to gain an advantage over opponents. Most of the current studies focus on using machine learning, quantitative, and qualitative methods to distinguish if a certain piece of information on social media is propaganda. Mainly conducted on English content, but very little research addresses Chinese Mandarin content. From propaganda detection, we want to go one step further to provide more fine-grained information on propaganda techniques that are applied. In this research, we aim to bridge the information gap by providing a multi-labeled propaganda techniques dataset in Mandarin based on a state-backed information operation dataset provided by Twitter. In addition to presenting the dataset, we apply a multi-label text classification using fine-tuned BERT. Potentially this could help future research in detecting state-backed propaganda online especially in a cross-lingual context and cross platforms identity consolidation.

Globalness Detection in Online Social Network

Classification problems have made significant progress due to the maturity of artificial intelligence (AI). However, differentiating items from categories without noticeable boundaries is still a huge challenge for machines -- which is also crucial for machines to be intelligent. In order to study the fuzzy concept on classification, we define and propose a globalness detection with the four-stage operational flow. We then demonstrate our framework on Facebook public pages inter-like graph with their geo-location. Our prediction algorithm achieves high precision (89%) and recall (88%) of local pages. We evaluate the results on both states and countries level, finding that the global node ratios are relatively high in those states (NY, CA) having large and international cities. Several global nodes examples have also been shown and studied in this paper. It is our hope that our results unveil the perfect value from every classification problem and provide a better understanding of global and local nodes in Online Social Networks (OSNs).