Alternative Narratives of Crisis Events: Communities and Social Botnets Engaged on Social Media

This paper presents an early stage exploratory analysis of communities engaging in alternative narratives about crisis events on social media. Over 11,000 user accounts on Twitter engaged in conversations questioning the mainstream narrative of the Paris Attacks and Umpqua Community College Shootings in Autumn 2015. We analyze the social network of communication, examining the composition of clusters of accounts with shared audiences. We describe some of the common traits within communities and note the prevalence of automated accounts. Our results shed light on the nature of the communities espousing alternative narratives and factors in the spread of the content.