Analyzing the Strategy of Propaganda using Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Evidence from the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Journal: arXiv (Cornell University)
Year: 2023

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. However, the strategy behind the dissemination of propaganda has remained unclear, particularly how the online discourse was strategically shaped by the propagandists' community. Here, we analyze the strategy of the Twitter community using an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach. Specifically, IRL allows us to model online behavior as a Markov decision process, where t