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Record W4412694941 · doi:10.1177/17427665251345593

Multimodal disinformation trolling campaigns targeting Canada

2025· article· en· W4412694941 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Ahmed Al‐Rawi

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal Media and Communication · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council
KeywordsDisinformationPolitical sciencePoliticsSocial mediaPublic relationsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper empirically analyses the way Russian, Iranian, Arab (Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian), and Chinese trolls targeted Canada with their Twitter campaigns, which often contained disinformation. The multimodal findings of this empirical study confirm that all these trolls promoted their respective countries and attacked Canada for its foreign policies that conflicted with their political agenda and geo-strategic interests, with the trolls only diverging in some areas. The more sophisticated trolls are found to be the Russian and Iranian ones due to their focus upon internal divisive issues in Canada.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.364
Threshold uncertainty score0.732

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.263 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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