Related papers: Unsupervised detection of coordinated information …
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 media platforms, particularly Twitter, have become pivotal arenas for influence campaigns, often orchestrated by state-sponsored information operations (IOs). This paper delves into the detection of key players driving IOs by…
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 explore the effects of coordinated users (i.e., users characterized by an unexpected, suspicious, or exceptional similarity) in information spreading on Twitter by quantifying the efficacy of their tactics in deceiving feed algorithms to…
Insider threats are a growing concern for organizations due to the amount of damage that their members can inflict by combining their privileged access and domain knowledge. Nonetheless, the detection of such threats is challenging,…
Social media platforms have become a hub for political activities and discussions, democratizing participation in these endeavors. However, they have also become an incubator for manipulation campaigns, like information operations (IOs).…
The problem of estimating event truths from conflicting agent opinions in a social network is investigated. An autoencoder learns the complex relationships between event truths, agent reliabilities and agent observations. A Bayesian network…
This paper considers the problem of automatically characterizing overall attitudes and biases that may be associated with emerging information operations via artificial intelligence. Accurate analysis of these emerging topics usually…
Social media is being increasingly weaponized by state-backed actors to elicit reactions, push narratives and sway public opinion. These are known as Information Operations (IO). The covert nature of IO makes their detection difficult. This…
Coordinated reply attacks are a tactic observed in online influence operations and other coordinated campaigns to support or harass targeted individuals, or influence them or their followers. Despite its potential to influence the public,…
Compromising legitimate accounts is a way of disseminating malicious content to a large user base in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Since the accounts cause lots of damages to the user and consequently to other users on OSNs, early…
The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct disinformation campaigns at immense scale, speed, and reach presents new challenges to identify and counter hostile influence operations (IOs). This paper presents an…
Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small…
In the last years, social media has gained an unprecedented amount of attention, playing a pivotal role in shaping the contemporary landscape of communication and connection. However, Coordinated Inhautentic Behaviour (CIB), defined as…
The rise of social media has been accompanied by a dark side with the ease of creating fake accounts and disseminating misinformation through coordinated attacks. Existing methods to identify such attacks often rely on thematic similarities…
We propose a fully unsupervised method to detect bias in contextualized embeddings. The method leverages the assortative information latently encoded by social networks and combines orthogonality regularization, structured sparsity…
Coordinated inauthentic behavior is used as a tool on social media to shape public opinion by elevating or suppressing topics using systematic engagements -- e.g. through *likes* or similar reactions. In an honest world, reactions may be…
Detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is central to the study of online influence operations. However, most methods focus on text-centric platforms, leaving video-first ecosystems like TikTok largely unexplored. To address this…
Information Operations (IOs) pose a significant threat to the integrity of democratic processes, with the potential to influence election-related online discourse. In anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we present a study…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…