Related papers: Exposing Paid Opinion Manipulation Trolls
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to train computers to perform a variety of complex tasks and improve with experience. Computers learn how to recognize patterns, make unintended decisions, or react to a dynamic environment. Certain…
As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts.…
Collecting annotations from human raters often results in a trade-off between the quantity of labels one wishes to gather and the quality of these labels. As such, it is often only possible to gather a small amount of high-quality labels.…
Automated decision making is used routinely throughout our everyday life. Recommender systems decide which jobs, movies, or other user profiles might be interesting to us. Spell checkers help us to make good use of language. Fraud detection…
A large proportion of online comments present on public domains are constructive, however a significant proportion are toxic in nature. The comments contain lot of typos which increases the number of features manifold, making the ML model…
We consider data poisoning attacks, a class of adversarial attacks on machine learning where an adversary has the power to alter a small fraction of the training data in order to make the trained classifier satisfy certain objectives. While…
In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the…
Online reviews are a vital source of information when purchasing a service or a product. Opinion spammers manipulate these reviews, deliberately altering the overall perception of the service. Though there exists a corpus of online reviews,…
[Context] Researchers analyze underground forums to study abuse and cybercrime activities. Due to the size of the forums and the domain expertise required to identify criminal discussions, most approaches employ supervised machine learning…
The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…
Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem in online communities. To identify cyberbullying cases in large-scale social networks, content moderators depend on machine learning classifiers for automatic cyberbullying detection. However, existing…
Influencer Marketing generated $16 billion in 2022. Usually, the more popular influencers are paid more for their collaborations. Thus, many services were created to boost profiles' popularity metrics through bots or fake accounts. However,…
We consider the problem of manipulating elections by cloning candidates. In our model, a manipulator can replace each candidate c by several clones, i.e., new candidates that are so similar to c that each voter simply replaces c in his vote…
In attempts to "explain" predictions of machine learning models, researchers have proposed hundreds of techniques for attributing predictions to features that are deemed important. While these attributions are often claimed to hold the…
Web discussion forums are used by millions of people worldwide to share information belonging to a variety of domains such as automotive vehicles, pets, sports, etc. They typically contain posts that fall into different categories such as…
Trolling and social bots have been proven as powerful tactics for manipulating the public opinion and sowing discord among Twitter users. This effort requires substantial content fabrication and account coordination to evade Twitter's…
Neural networks are among the most accurate supervised learning methods in use today. However, their opacity makes them difficult to trust in critical applications, especially when conditions in training may differ from those in practice.…
As LLMs become more widely deployed, there is increasing interest in directly optimizing for feedback from end users (e.g. thumbs up) in addition to feedback from paid annotators. However, training to maximize human feedback creates a…