778 research outputs found
Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams
Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing
person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of
information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which
public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an
extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion
in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling
massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that
leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect
astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S.
political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by
our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection
of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from
the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced
annotations
Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere
We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users
engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework
that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our
dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a
minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work
for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages.
We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence
and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of
the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make
nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in
affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201
Cashtag piggybacking: uncovering spam and bot activity in stock microblogs on Twitter
Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded
volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that
much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized
by bots and spammers. Yet, the presence (or lack thereof) and the impact of
fake stock microblogs has never systematically been investigated before. Here,
we study 9M tweets related to stocks of the 5 main financial markets in the US.
By comparing tweets with financial data from Google Finance, we highlight
important characteristics of Twitter stock microblogs. More importantly, we
uncover a malicious practice - referred to as cashtag piggybacking -
perpetrated by coordinated groups of bots and likely aimed at promoting
low-value stocks by exploiting the popularity of high-value ones. Among the
findings of our study is that as much as 71% of the authors of suspicious
financial tweets are classified as bots by a state-of-the-art spambot detection
algorithm. Furthermore, 37% of them were suspended by Twitter a few months
after our investigation. Our results call for the adoption of spam and bot
detection techniques in all studies and applications that exploit
user-generated content for predicting the stock market
$1.00 per RT #BostonMarathon #PrayForBoston: analyzing fake content on Twitter
This study found that 29% of the most viral content on Twitter during the Boston bombing crisis were rumors and fake content.AbstractOnline social media has emerged as one of the prominent channels for dissemination of information during real world events. Malicious content is posted online during events, which can result in damage, chaos and monetary losses in the real world. We analyzed one such media i.e. Twitter, for content generated during the event of Boston Marathon Blasts, that occurred on April, 15th, 2013. A lot of fake content and malicious profiles originated on Twitter network during this event. The aim of this work is to perform in-depth characterization of what factors influenced in malicious content and profiles becoming viral. Our results showed that 29% of the most viral content on Twitter, during the Boston crisis were rumors and fake content; while 51% was generic opinions and comments; and rest was true information. We found that large number of users with high social reputation and verified accounts were responsible for spreading the fake content. Next, we used regression prediction model, to verify that, overall impact of all users who propagate the fake content at a given time, can be used to estimate the growth of that content in future. Many malicious accounts were created on Twitter during the Boston event, that were later suspended by Twitter. We identified over six thousand such user profiles, we observed that the creation of such profiles surged considerably right after the blasts occurred. We identified closed community structure and star formation in the interaction network of these suspended profiles amongst themselves
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