A Socio-political Analysis of Arabic Social Media Attacks Using Computational Modeling

that impose damage to humans and organizations. There is an increased number in state-sponsored social cyber mediated attacks that, target countries and governments. Recent studies have shown several attempts to discredit the power of different US governmental in,stitutions through spreading of misinformation on social media. Such studies demonstrated the importance of mitigating all forms of, social cyber mediated attacks as a new type of weapon against the US. One of the major consequences of those attacks is the difficu,lty of mitigation. Mitigation efforts against attacks-in English language are driven by computational and social tools that identify, diffusers, their motivations, and spreading patterns. However, such attacks also target non-English speakers. Recent research has f, ten most spoken languages in the world. Although researchers have investigated diverse forms of language-based attacks in Arabic, l,imited attention is paid to studying social mediated cyber attacks and their socio-political influences on the targeted countries, w,hich mainly include the United States. The proposed project will create a new socio-political framework for analysis and, of social cyber-attacks in Arabic speaking countries. It will 1) examine the connection between social cyber-attacks and social med,ia discourses in Arabic, 2) identify the implications of Arabic social media attacks on the geopolitical context and issues related, to the US, 3) conduct assessments on how the structure of communities is affected when spreaders of social mediated attacks feel th,at their claims remained unfulfilled, 4) investigate-language dynamics in the identified malicious communities on Arabic social medi,a and the ways the Arabic language is manipulated to build a sense of community, enforce collective values, shut down debates, or ev,en cause damaging behaviors in the name of ideology and politics, 5) understand the ideologies of actions and interpretation of even,ts and how social cyber-attacks with political context led to such events, 6) identify the scope of state sponsor and non-state acto,rs and communities in the region to de-polarize democratizing power of the Internet through social cyber mediated threats and cuttin,g-edge propaganda, 7) identify Arabic bots on social media and their roles in diffusing bad content. Our framework will focus on six, countries Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan. Such countries are tied to certain conflicts in the region, such a,s the role of Iran in Iraq and Syria, the ideological conflicts inside those countries, Israel-Arab world conflicts, human rights, t,he war in Yemen, the Russian role in Syria, and the role of Iran in Lebanon through the radical group-Hezbu-Allah. This research is, driven by 1) computational techniques to identify communities and attacks, 2) the BEND framework which contains the main pillars to, conduct research on social cyber security, and 3) Socio-political theoretical approaches. The proposed framework is driven by appro,ill utilize graph centrality and language models to measure how stories are developed to create topic-oriented communities. It intro,duces graph and content analytics to categorize social cyber-mediated attacks on Arabic social media and measuring their polarizatio,n effects. The proposed work will investigate platforms such as Twitter and YouTube to-identify leading actors, networks, emerging t,rends, as well as user opinions. This analysis will reveal-suspicious behaviors that cause algorithmic manipulations of Arabic conte,nt on social media.-and measuring their polarization effects.