Related papers: Exposing Paid Opinion Manipulation Trolls
Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…
Many models have been proposed to explain opinion formation in groups of individuals; most of these models study opinion propagation as the interaction between nodes/agents in a social network. Opinion formation is a complex process and a…
Online consumer reviews reflect the testimonials of real people, unlike advertisements. As such, they have critical impact on potential consumers, and indirectly on businesses. According to a Harvard study (Luca 2011), +1 rise in…
In recent years, machine learning algorithms have become ubiquitous in a multitude of high-stakes decision-making applications. The unparalleled ability of machine learning algorithms to learn patterns from data also enables them to…
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
In today's world, the presence of online disinformation and propaganda is more widespread than ever. Independent publishers are funded mostly via digital advertising, which is unfortunately also the case for those publishing disinformation…
Considering the large amount of content created online by the minute, slang-aware automatic tools are critically needed to promote social good, and assist policymakers and moderators in restricting the spread of offensive language, abuse,…
We consider manipulation problems when the manipulator only has partial information about the votes of the nonmanipulators. Such partial information is described by an information set, which is the set of profiles of the nonmanipulators…
Large-scale pretrained models using self-supervised learning have reportedly improved the performance of speech anti-spoofing. However, the attacker side may also make use of such models. Also, since it is very expensive to train such…
Online toxic content has grown into a pervasive phenomenon, intensifying during times of crisis, elections, and social unrest. A significant amount of research has been focused on detecting or analyzing toxic content using machine-learning…
Consider the following model to study adversarial effects on opinion forming. A set of initially selected experts form their binary opinion while being influenced by an adversary, who may convince some of them of the falsehood. All other…
Recent works have demonstrated the existence of {\it adversarial examples} targeting a single machine learning system. In this paper we ask a simple but fundamental question of "selective fooling": given {\it multiple} machine learning…
Today, the internet is an integral part of our daily lives, enabling people to be more connected than ever before. However, this greater connectivity and access to information increase exposure to harmful content such as cyber-bullying and…
In the Group Identification problem, we are given a set of individuals and are asked to identify a socially qualified subset among them. Each individual in the set has an opinion about who should be considered socially qualified. There are…
With the recent rise of toxicity in online conversations on social media platforms, using modern machine learning algorithms for toxic comment detection has become a central focus of many online applications. Researchers and companies have…
Neural network (NN) trojaning attack is an emerging and important attack model that can broadly damage the system deployed with NN models. Existing studies have explored the outsourced training attack scenario and transfer learning attack…
Algorithmic agents permeate every instant of our online existence. Based on our digital profiles built from the massive surveillance of our digital existence, algorithmic agents rank search results, filter our emails, hide and show news…
Combating fake news and misinformation propagation is a challenging task in the post-truth era. News feed and search algorithms could potentially lead to unintentional large-scale propagation of false and fabricated information with users…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…