Cyber Troops in Networked Korea

Wedge-Driving Twitter Rumors in 2013

In 2012 and 2013, the NIS's comment troops partnered with the Department of Defense to further cyber-psychological warfare with North Korea. Unlike conventional psychological warfare that targets citizens of the enemy country, the cyber troops in this case intended to spread propaganda to its own citizens within South Korea. The rumors that they spread were hostile not only to North Korea but also to political left-wingers in their own country.

Kwon, Rao, and Bang (2016) studied tweets during the saber-rattling between South and North Korea in 2013. Among the tweets, they categorized "wedge-driving rumors," defined as "unverified proposition(s) toned with derogation, blame, or attack toward a specific target group" (p. 4). According to their analysis,

The WDR (Wedge Driving Rumoring) network, not surprisingly, reflected derogatory themes. They were ranged from defaming certain individuals such as historic or current politicians (C1) or even a public figure in a non-political sector (C2), to distorting a historical political event that is not directly related with the current threat, and to evoke Cold War rhetoric to attack opposite political ideology (C4 and C5) (p.215)

Note: "C" means thematic clusters. Each cluster includes keywords that characterize the content of tweets. See the figure below. 

Reference: Kwon, K. H., Bang, C. C., Egnoto, M., & Raghav Rao, H. (2016). Social Media Rumors as Improvised Public Opinion: Semantic Network Analyses of Twitter Discourses during Korean Saber Rattling 2013. Asian Journal of Communication, 26(3), 201-222.



 

This page has paths:

This page has tags:

This page references: