Stories from Blogs: Computational Extraction and Visualization of Narratives

Social media platforms are designed to serve as an avenue for people to connect with like-minded individuals to discuss their views and promote democracy. However, they have become a tool for deviant actors to undermine the same. Due to the anonymity and perceived less personal risk, deviant groups coordinate on these platforms to spread fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. Social media platforms such as blogs that are unregulated and provide richer space for content generation are strategically used for agenda setting, content framing, and weaponizing narratives to radicalize mobs and provoke hysteria. The recent events and protests coordinated through social media demonstrate the critical need for tools to identify these fringe narratives early on. In this paper, we demonstrate a narrative visualization tool that provides an analyst the ability to identify prominent themes and associated narratives. The tool builds upon published framework to extract narratives from blogs and is available for public use through the Blogtrackers application.