Related papers: A black market for upvotes and likes
Popular Internet services in recent years have shown that remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing the power of the masses using crowd-sourcing systems. However, crowd-sourcing systems can also pose a real challenge to existing…
Facebook pages offer an easy way to reach out to a very large audience as they can easily be promoted using Facebook's advertising platform. Recently, the number of likes of a Facebook page has become a measure of its popularity and…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
We conduct an experimental analysis of a dataset comprising over 27 million microtasks performed by over 70,000 workers issued to a large crowdsourcing marketplace between 2012-2016. Using this data---never before analyzed in an academic…
Social networks offer convenient ways to seamlessly reach out to large audiences. In particular, Facebook pages are increasingly used by businesses, brands, and organizations to connect with multitudes of users worldwide. As the number of…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
Online media platforms have enabled users to connect with individuals, organizations, and share their thoughts. Other than connectivity, these platforms also serve multiple purposes - education, promotion, updates, awareness, etc.…
As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting popular web…
Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In order to…
Twitter has increasingly become a popular platform to share news and user opinion. A tweet is considered to be important if it receives high number of affirmative reactions from other Twitter users via Retweets. Retweet count is thus…
Online crowdfunding has received a great deal of attention from entrepreneurs and policymakers as a promising avenue to fostering entrepreneurship and innovation. A notable aspect of this shift from an offline to an online setting is that…
Fact-checking is one of the effective solutions in fighting online misinformation. However, traditional fact-checking is a process requiring scarce expert human resources, and thus does not scale well on social media because of the…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
Social networks help to bond people who share similar interests all over the world. As a complement, the Facebook "Like" button is an efficient tool that bonds people with the online information. People click on the "Like" button to express…
An important part of online activities are intended to control the public opinion and behavior, being considered currently a global threat. This article identifies and conceptualizes seven online strategies employed in social media…
Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been…
Online social media platforms have made the world more connected than ever before, thereby making it easier for everyone to spread their content across a wide variety of audiences. Twitter is one such popular platform where people publish…
The rise in adoption of cryptoassets has brought many new and inexperienced investors in the cryptocurrency space. These investors can be disproportionally influenced by information they receive online, and particularly from social media.…
The popularity of Twitter has fostered the emergence of various fraudulent user activities - one such activity is to artificially bolster the social reputation of Twitter profiles by gaining a large number of followers within a short time…
In this paper, we aim to gain a better understanding into how paid microtask crowdsourcing could leverage its appeal and scaling power by using contests to boost crowd performance and engagement. We introduce our microtask-based annotation…