Social Media Narratives in Pulse

Social media narratives can be found within Command via the Reports tab on the search bar:

Social narratives are a collection of similar social media posts from a range of social media platforms, highlighting a conversation occurring across the internet.

Social narratives reports have 3 scheduling frequencies (daily/weekly/monthly). Once you set up / access your monitor, toggling Auto-Generation will schedule a report for each frequency, and you get to choose which day of the week / month your Weekly and Monthly Social Narratives are triggered, as well as the time of day for your Daily Social Narrative. Once a report is scheduled, a status of Queued will remain on the card until the report run is triggered.

Daily - Enabling Auto-generation will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 24hrs, ending at the time you set in the scheduling module.

Weekly - Enabling Auto-generation and choosing a day of the week will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 7 days, ending at 9pm CT the previous day.

Monthly - Enabling Auto-generation and choosing a day of the month will schedule the report to run the following morning. The historical look-back window for this report is a 30 days, ending at 9pm CT the previous day.

When you load the Social Narrative Report, you'll see this page:

The overview shows you how many narratives were collected over the course of 24 hours / 1 week / 1 month.

For each social narrative, we will provide the Trajectory, Inauthenticity, Impact, and any participating Factions. Each of those metrics is described below

Trajectory helps you understand whether the narrative is speeding up or slowing down in volume of participation and repetition across accounts, and supplies a meaningful short-range prediction. It reflects the post volume of the narrative during the current report period, as well as trend direction from previous appearances of the narrative:

We frame inauthenticity as "the percentage of posts from potentially inauthentic accounts" relative to "the typical inauthenticity level for the measured platform." We identify inauthentic actor/poster behavior across Discord, 8Kun, 4Chan, Gab, Looksmax, MeWe, Pastebin, Reddit, Stormfront, and Telegram.

We assess potential inauthenticity based on posting behavior, follower networks, and the age of the account. Escalated levels of inauthenticity indicate a concerted effort to propel a narrative or agenda and is therefore useful for highlighting narrative manipulation.

"Typical" inauthenticity is determined by calculating a general baseline of inauthenticity we expect across all platforms, categorized by post volume.

Impact is calculated using a weighted combination of several metrics, including influence, faction coordination, post volume, and authenticity, primarily used to understand the potential risk of a narrative.

You can use the Impact rating to prioritize and triage your narratives. "Low impact" indicates it is worth maintaining awareness only. "Moderate impact" indicates the narrative should be tracked carefully, and "High Impact" should likely be escalated and actioned.

Factions

For certain Narratives, you'll notice Faction composition. Factions are groups of social media accounts or online communities that share a common articulated ideology, passion, purpose, and/or idiomatic language and who through that similarity spread narratives and disproportionately shape public opinion.

The Faction Participation metric represents the % by which a faction has engaged with (posted, replied, retweeted) this narrative, and how much of the overall engagement they represent.

You can click on each faction (from which "Faction Detail" will pop up) and learn more about their influence, reach, political alignment, "Faction VIPs", social platforms used, and aligned factions:

The following video explains how to engage with the narrative detail feature. Please note: narrative details will only show up in narratives that have faction engagement.

You can hide irrelevant narratives from your report by selecting the eye icon in the left-hand side bar:

You can download the social narrative report as a word doc, by selecting the download button on the top right of the screen:

You can also view past reports that have been generated from the "Past Reports" tab in the Reports page:

Please reach out to the team at [email protected] with any questions or feedback on the social narratives functionality!