Related papers: Exposing Paid Opinion Manipulation Trolls
Online questionnaires that use crowd-sourcing platforms to recruit participants have become commonplace, due to their ease of use and low costs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Large Language Models (LLM) have made it easy for bad actors…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources, including news, discussion forums, books, and online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes opinions and perspectives which, on one hand, celebrate democracy…
With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a…
It is a widely accepted fact that state-sponsored Twitter accounts operated during the 2016 US presidential election spreading millions of tweets with misinformation and inflammatory political content. Whether these social media campaigns…
Consumers increasingly rate, review and research products online. Consequently, websites containing consumer reviews are becoming targets of opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable instances of opinion…
The spread of online hate has become a significant problem for newspapers that host comment sections. As a result, there is growing interest in using machine learning and natural language processing for (semi-) automated abusive language…
The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features. These approaches are increasingly brittle as generative…
The reports of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections brought into the center of public attention concerns related to the ability of foreign actors to increase social discord and take advantage of personal user data for…
Can machine learning models for recommendation be easily fooled? While the question has been answered for hand-engineered fake user profiles, it has not been explored for machine learned adversarial attacks. This paper attempts to close…
We introduce a model of opinion dynamics based on networked non-linear differential equations. The model combines a linear attraction with a repulsive hyperbolic tangent interaction, labeled controversialness. For low controversialness the…
Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…
Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) has been implemented on many websites to identify between harmful automated bots and legitimate users. However, the revenue generated by the bots has…
The current study yielded a number of important findings. We managed to build a neural network that achieved an accuracy score of 91 per cent in classifying troll and genuine tweets. By means of regression analysis, we identified a number…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
According to the classical definition, propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by manipulation of significant symbols. However this definition has changed to computational propaganda, the way manipulation takes place in digital…
The spread of fake news, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and harmful content online raised concerns among social media platforms, government agencies, policymakers, and society as a whole. This is because such harmful or abusive…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
False information spread via the internet and social media influences public opinion and user activity, while generative models enable fake content to be generated faster and more cheaply than had previously been possible. In the not so…