SoK: The Ghost Trilemma

Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try as it might, the security community has been unable to stem the rising tide of such problems. We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties of identity -- sentience, location, and uniqueness -- that cannot be simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. Many fully-decentralized systems -- whether for communication or social coordination -- grapple with this trilemma in some way, perhaps unknowingly. We examine the design space, use cases, problems with prior approaches, and possible paths forward. We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options for practical, incrementally deployable schemes to achieve an acceptable tradeoff of trust in centralized trust anchors, decentralized operation, and an ability to withstand a range of attacks, while protecting user privacy.Comment: 22 pages with 1 figure and 8 table

The Rise of iWar: Identity, Information, and the Individualization of Modern Warfare

During a decade of global counterterrorism operations and two extended counterinsurgency campaigns, the United States was confronted with a new kind of adversary. Without uniforms, flags, and formations, the task of identifying and targeting these combatants represented an unprecedented operational challenge for which Cold War era doctrinal methods were largely unsuited. This monograph examines the doctrinal, technical, and bureaucratic innovations that evolved in response to these new operational challenges. It discusses the transition from a conventionally focused, Cold War-era targeting process to one optimized for combating networks and conducting identity-based targeting. It analyzes the policy decisions and strategic choices that were the catalysts of this change and concludes with an in depth examination of emerging technologies that are likely to shape how this mode of warfare will be waged in the future.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1436/thumbnail.jp

Directions in abusive language training data, a systematic review: Garbage in, garbage out

Data-driven and machine learning based approaches for detecting, categorising and measuring abusive content such as hate speech and harassment have gained traction due to their scalability, robustness and increasingly high performance. Making effective detection systems for abusive content relies on having the right training datasets, reflecting a widely accepted mantra in computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out. However, creating training datasets which are large, varied, theoretically-informed and that minimize biases is difficult, laborious and requires deep expertise. This paper systematically reviews 63 publicly available training datasets which have been created to train abusive language classifiers. It also reports on creation of a dedicated website for cataloguing abusive language data hatespeechdata.com. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of open science in this field, and argue that although more dataset sharing would bring many benefits it also poses social and ethical risks which need careful consideration. Finally, we provide evidence-based recommendations for practitioners creating new abusive content training datasets

PARA-ANTISOCIALITY: HATRED, CELEBRITY, PROJECTION, ATTRACTION, IMPOTENCE, AND CATHARSIS IN LIMINAL SOCIETIES

The last three decades of media expansion and technological innovation, encompassing the 24-hour media news cycle, the original desktop- and later site-based internet, gaming, social media, and the smartphone, have radically altered the means by which citizens of the developed and developing world access information and how they construct and maintain relationships. As the reach, robustness, ubiquity, and engagement potential of the two-dimensional world have expanded, those of the three-dimensional world have diminished (an effect accelerated during the COVID and post-COVID eras). As one world atrophies, a new one rushes in to fill the void. Celebrity culture; neoliberal economic policies; the decline of family, community, and organised religion; and the post-World War II suburbanisation and aesthetic sterilisation of shared spaces have all contributed to the decay and fragilization of the antecedent meat space (in-person) bonds. In their place, has risen the parasocial relationship—that between audience and performer or, in more modern terminology, content creator and content consumer. Why celebrities/content creators are loved is not the question to be posed herein. Notoriety, adulation, status, physical attractiveness, and charm—these all do much to explain why the famous and would-be famous alike are regarded with affection. Why they are hated—as they often are, if only by a portion of their audience—is less clear. This paper will examine the origins and utility of antagonistic parasocial relationships as well as the extent to which para-antisociality is harmful to content creators and consumers and what (if anything) can and should be done to manage hostility in parasocial relationships.  Article visualizations

Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash

Digital media enables not only fast sharing of information, but also disinformation. One prominent case of an event leading to circulation of disinformation on social media is the MH17 plane crash. Studies analysing the spread of information about this event on Twitter have focused on small, manually annotated datasets, or used proxys for data annotation. In this work, we examine to what extent text classifiers can be used to label data for subsequent content analysis, in particular we focus on predicting pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Twitter content related to the MH17 plane crash. Even though we find that a neural classifier improves over a hashtag based baseline, labeling pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian content with high precision remains a challenging problem. We provide an error analysis underlining the difficulty of the task and identify factors that might help improve classification in future work. Finally, we show how the classifier can facilitate the annotation task for human annotators

Understanding misinformation on Twitter in the context of controversial issues

Social media is slowly supplementing, or even replacing, traditional media outlets such as television, newspapers, and radio. However, social media presents some drawbacks when it comes to circulating information. These drawbacks include spreading false information, rumors, and fake news. At least three main factors create these drawbacks: The filter bubble effect, misinformation, and information overload. These factors make gathering accurate and credible information online very challenging, which in turn may affect public trust in online information. These issues are even more challenging when the issue under discussion is a controversial topic. In this thesis, four main controversial topics are studied, each of which comes from a different domain. This variation of domains can give a broad view of how misinformation is manifested in social media, and how it is manifested differently in different domains. This thesis aims to understand misinformation in the context of controversial issue discussions. This can be done through understanding how misinformation is manifested in social media as well as by understanding people’s opinions towards these controversial issues. In this thesis, three different aspects of a tweet are studied. These aspects are 1) the user sharing the information, 2) the information source shared, and 3) whether specific linguistic cues can help in assessing the credibility of information on social media. Finally, the web application tool TweetChecker is used to allow online users to have a more in-depth understanding of the discussions about five different controversial health issues. The results and recommendations of this study can be used to build solutions for the problem of trustworthiness of user-generated content on different social media platforms, especially for controversial issues

Pirates, Hydras, Trolls, and... Authors? On the Authorial Capacities of Digital Media Piracy

In this thesis, I undertake a positive analysis of digital media piracy to examine the movement’s authorial capacities. Proposed by James Meese as a way of looking beyond the traditional “piracy is theft” framework, this perspective offers new insights about how the increasingly mundane act of downloading and sharing media files can incite social change. I begin by examining what it means to be a digital media pirate, and how that question is part of the construction of the piracy movement. In the second chapter, I explore the complex relationship between piracy and information capitalism, highlighting how piracy arises from within information capitalism. In the third chapter, I look to how moral panic discourse has been used to demonize pirates, but also how this process has been appropriated by pirates to circulate counter-hegemonic discourse. In the fourth chapter, I examine how pirates are the authors of alternative ethical criteria within private filesharing communities, and how pirates mobilize moral and ethical discourse to push back against attempts to impede their ability to pursue a good piratical life. The final chapter of this thesis takes up the ethnographically rich moment of the Kickass Torrents shutdown in July 2016. Looking at the shut down as an event that like digital media piracy is both meaningful yet mundane, we see how pirates, though contesting romanticized and naturalized norms of property and authorship, push for a new form of authorship constituted by p2p communication in online spaces. Through these perspectives on the piracy movement in the summer of 2016, I argue that through the agglomerated effects of individual acts of piracy, the broader piracy movement radically changes the ways we understand and engage with cultural media objects

Scholarship in abundance: Influence, engagement, and attention in scholarly networks

In an era of knowledge abundance, scholars have the capacity to distribute and share ideas and artifacts via digital networks, yet networked scholarly engagement often remains unrecognized within institutional spheres of influence. The purpose of this dissertation study is to explore the meanings constructed and enacted within the networked practices of 13 scholars actively engaged in both institutional and networked participatory scholarship. Using ethnographic methods including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, the study investigates networks as sites of scholarship, with the intent of furthering institutional academia’s understanding of networked practices. The three papers that make up the dissertation each articulate a specific thread of intersection between institutional and networked scholarship: the first focuses on what counts as academic influence within networked circles, the second on networks’ terms of value and reward, and the third on the relationships between attention, care, and vulnerability in scholarly networks. Together, the papers conclude that networked scholarly practices of engagement align broadly with those of academia, yet enable and demand scholars’ individual cultivation of influence, visibility, and audiences. Thus networked scholarship rewards connection, collaboration, and curation between individuals rather than roles or institutions, fostering cross-disciplinary and public engagement and a bridging of the personal/professional divide. The study contributes to knowledge by situating networked scholarly practices within the scholarly tradition, while articulating the terms on which knowledge abundance and networked practices open up new spheres of opportunity and vulnerability for scholars

POLITICS AND PERFORMATIVE AGENCY IN NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which social media in Nigeria functions through online signifying practices as a strategy of demarginalization and subaltern resistance. I engage with this perspective by framing Web 2.0 platforms as enablers of citizens’ right to public and performative speech. Interested in the ways in which netizens imagine the nation and perform political selves and identities through viral and popular images on social media, my dissertation underpins a reading of social media that is grounded in an expanded conception of speech, visual and/or verbal. This approach enables me to take cognizance of the voices and perspectives secured by the decentralized capacity of digital media for everyday citizens with access to the Internet. Engaging with how social media re-centers alternative perspectives to prevailing orthodoxies, I explore the ways in which marginal groups, mostly relegated to the periphery of governmental power, emerge in performative spaces of public discourses through digital cultural signifiers such as the selfie, viral Internet memes, and humorous political cartoons posted online. I show that despite the limitations of cyberspace and the uneven access to internet technologies in some parts of Nigeria, social media is a discursive, if not contested, space of cultural production from which postcolonial subjects ‘author’ media narratives that revise, resist, and challenge exclusion and marginality. By analyzing the significations of user-generated cultural forms, mostly fictional images (Internet memes) and actual performative representations (the selfie) produced as vectors of digital activism and resistance, the dissertation highlights the varied ways in which social media functions as a rearticulating mechanism for a more inclusive appearance of young people and women in Nigeria’s public sphere. I analyze the production and circulation of these images within a framework that positions them as supplemental performative strategies to digital activism. Extrapolating the economy of meanings inherent in these images begins, for me, by unsettling the postmodern assumption that mediatized culture is futile for resistance. The refutation of such arguments is necessary to consolidate the claim that the capacity for agency and representation, which social media affords excluded or oppressed populations is more pertinent than the positivist and teleological expectations some scholars have of digital articulations of dissent