Why Is This First? Understanding and Analyzing Internet Search Results

Primarily due to their convenience, online search engines such as Google and Bing are becoming a central location for obtaining information. As a result, societies give search engines tremendous control over the spread of information to the public. Through a high-school-level sample lesson plan, the article was written to promote dialogue with teachers on the importance of teaching the intricacies of search engines. The sample lesson plan begins with fundamental knowledge on the functionality of search engines with emphasis on algorithms. With this instruction, students can understand not only search engines, but also their manipulation potential, which leads to ramifications. Using the manipulation potential as a catalyst, many societal concerns are raised, such as spread of misinformation, oppression of certain groups, and impact on behavior. Through this instruction and dialogue, practitioners will have a resource to integrate search engines into their curriculum in response to this new concern

Unveiling Coordinated Groups Behind White Helmets Disinformation

Propaganda, disinformation, manipulation, and polarization are the modern illnesses of a society increasingly dependent on social media as a source of news. In this paper, we explore the disinformation campaign, sponsored by Russia and allies, against the Syria Civil Defense (a.k.a. the White Helmets). We unveil coordinated groups using automatic retweets and content duplication to promote narratives and/or accounts. The results also reveal distinct promoting strategies, ranging from the small groups sharing the exact same text repeatedly, to complex "news website factories" where dozens of accounts synchronously spread the same news from multiple sites.Comment: To be presented at WWW 2020 Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior and forthcoming in the Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 202

Discovery of the Twitter Bursty Botnet

Many Twitter users are bots. They can be used for spamming, opinion manipulation and online fraud. Recently, we discovered the Star Wars botnet, consisting of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively from Star Wars novels. The bots were exposed because they tweeted uniformly from any location within two rectangle-shaped geographic zones covering Europe and the USA, including sea and desert areas in the zones. In this chapter, we report another unusual behaviour of the Star Wars bots, that the bots were created in bursts or batches, and they only tweeted in their first few minutes since creation. Inspired by this observation, we discovered an even larger Twitter botnet, the Bursty botnet with more than 500,000 bots. Our preliminary study showed that the Bursty botnet was directly responsible for a large-scale online spamming attack in 2012. Most bot detection algorithms have been based on assumptions of “common” features that were supposedly shared by all bots. Our discovered botnets, however, do not show many of those features; instead, they were detected by their distinct, unusual tweeting behaviours that were unknown until now

Threat or Opportunity? - Examining Social Bots in Social Media Crisis Communication

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps. However, there are indications that not only humans, but also social bots are active on these platforms during crisis situations. Although identifying the impact of social bots during extreme events seems to be a highly relevant topic, research remains sparse. To fill this research gap, we started a bigger project in analysing the influence of social bots during crisis situations. As a part of this project, we initially conducted a case study on the Manchester Bombing 2017 and analysed the social bot activity. Our results indicate that mainly benign bots are active during crisis situations. While the quantity of the bot accounts is rather low, their tweet activity indicates a high influence

The Trump Campaign Computational Propaganda Challenge for the Indian Parliamentary Elections 2019

Digital technology tools like any computerized system have a viral tendency and what awaits the Indian Elections in 2019 is a Trump style sophisticated digital computational propaganda. Such tools are emerging as threats to democracies, especially like India, with a free media and a booming population, connecting to the web through smart hand-held devices, increasingly relying on social media for its news sources. The Indian landscape for digital privacy is also fertile with vast amounts of data being pilfered, hacked and legally accumulated. If carefully designed election propaganda based on fake news and bots is launched on the eve of the 2019 elections who will protect the pillars of Indian democracy? This qualitative study paper with a triangulation of two methods examines the role of computational propaganda in elections and undertakes to find the likelihood of its replication during the Indian general elections in 2019