UA Little Rock Acquired Multi-Year Grant From DoD

COSMOS will utilize its programs–VTracker and BTracker–to gather data from YouTube and blogs.

FREMONT, CA: At the Little Rock’s Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies–COSMOS–the University of Arkansas (UA) has acquired a multi-year grant from a Department of Defense initiative to examine covert online information campaigns in the Indo-Pacific region.

UA Little Rock will collaborate on the five-year project at multi-level models of covert online information campaigns and the University of Regina, Carnegie Mellon University,  and The Atlantic Council. The complete funding for the project, which is headed by Dr. Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University, is $5 million. Jerry L, Dr. Nitin Agarwal,  Maulden-Entergy endowed chair, a prominent professor of information science, and the founding director of COSMOS, will be the principal investigator for UA Little Rock, which will receive $456,657 to examine online information campaigns during protests, elections, and other significant events in the Indo-Pacific region.

Dr. Agarwal describes influence campaigns as information designed and communicated to wobble the public's opinion or influence people’s beliefs and behaviors. Influence campaigns are evolving and becoming more refined. They are usually well-orchestrated, distributed across numerous social media platforms, and conducted by humans, bots, and cyborg-like actors. In this project, COSMOS studies tactics deployed in online confidential influence campaigns that focus on the Indo-Pacific. COSMOS will utilize its programs–VTracker and BTracker–to gather data from YouTube and blogs. The data will be utilized to track a video or a blog post’s dissemination across numerous media platforms and their consequence.

The online narratives that COSMOS researchers are tracking:

•  Efforts to improve Chinese social, economic, political, and cultural dominance in the Indo-Pacific region

•  Efforts to sabotage U.S. leadership in the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific region

•  U.S. military efforts in the Indo-Pacific region is meant to initiate a war with China and Russia

•  Countries in Southeast Asia must advance with China to find alternatives against America’s preeminence in Asia.

•  The Rohingya are secret U.S. proxies or Saudi-backed ISIS militants

COSMOS researchers will employ a collaborative action theory-based model, social network theories, and social influence theory to lay the groundwork for identifying coordination and calculating the power of online influence campaigns.