Cross-platform information spread during the January 6th capitol riots

Abstract

Social media has become an integral component of the modern information system. An average person typically has multiple accounts across different platforms. At the same time, the rise of social media facilitates the spread of online mis/disinformation narratives within and across these platforms. In this study, we characterize the coordinated information dissemination of information laden with mis- and disinformation narratives within and across two platforms, Parler and Twitter, during the online discourse surrounding the January 6th 2021 Capitol Riots event. Through the use of username similarity, we discover joint theme endorsements between both platforms. Using anomalously high volume of shared-link matches of external websites and YouTube videos, we discover separate information consumption habits between both platforms, with very few common sources of information between users of the different platforms. However, through analyzing the similarity of the texts with Locality Sensitive Hashing of constructed text vectors, we identify similar narratives between the platforms despite separate consumption of external websites, highlighting the similarities and differences of information spread within and between the two social media environments.