“Information Warfare” and Online News Commenting: Analyzing Forces of Social Influence Through Location-Based Commenting User Typology:

While most of the online participation research assumes the Western notion of fulfilling deliberative practices, online contexts have been also found to be an active battleground for so-called information warfare. To test the potential for online comments being used by cross-national political opponents, we analyze the case of online comments on the most active Lithuanian online news portal’s Russian-language edition. This news portal presents itself as a unique case, since Russia was found to engage in a support or mobilization of the compatriot community in the Baltic States by exercising “soft influence.”To analyze such “soft influence” our study proposed a framework called Commenting User Typology (CUT). The CUT combines three types of data points: a) content level (topic of the story category), b) user level (frequency of posting), and c) the timing and location of the posting to contribute to studies of online social influence.We have applied the CUT framework to the commenting practices of 4,940 us...