Related papers: Deception and the Strategy of Influence
Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users…
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…
Deception is a fundamental issue across a diverse array of settings, from cybersecurity, where decoys (e.g., honeypots) are an important tool, to politics that can feature politically motivated "leaks" and fake news about candidates.Typical…
This paper presents four examples of different ways that coordinated influence operations exert pressure on the prominence of ideas on social networks. We argue that these examples illustrate the four archetypical paths to influence:…
Censorship and the distribution of false information, tools used to manipulate what users see and believe, are seemingly at opposite ends of the information access spectrum. Most previous work has examined them in isolation and within…
Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such…
In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…
With the ever growing networking capabilities and services offered to users, attack surfaces have been increasing exponentially, additionally, the intricacy of network architectures has increased the complexity of cyber-defenses, to this…
Social Engineering is the act of manipulating individuals to perform actions or reveal information. Social engineering tactics are widely recognized as a significant risk to information security. The increasing digital environment has…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
Why do Social Media Corporations (SMCs) engage in state-linked information operations? Social media can significantly influence the global political landscape, allowing governments and other political entities to engage in concerted…
At the latest since the advent of the Internet, disinformation and conspiracy theories have become ubiquitous. Recent examples like QAnon and Pizzagate prove that false information can lead to real violence. In this motivation statement for…
The battlefield of information warfare has moved to online social networks, where influence campaigns operate at unprecedented speed and scale. As with any strategic domain, success requires understanding the terrain, modeling adversaries,…
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…
The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
The spread of misinformation is a pressing global problem that has elicited a range of responses from researchers, policymakers, civil society and industry. Over the past decade, these stakeholders have developed many interventions to…
A common assumption in the social learning literature is that agents exchange information in an unselfish manner. In this work, we consider the scenario where a subset of agents aims at deceiving the network, meaning they aim at driving the…
Persuasion is part and parcel of human interaction. The human persuaders in society have been always exit, masters of rhetoric skilled of changing our minds, or at least our behaviors. Leaders, mothers, salesmen, and teachers are clear…