139,324 research outputs found
Why Do You Spread This Message? Understanding Users Sentiment in Social Media Campaigns
Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns.
Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence
the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the
relationship between followers sentiment towards the campaign topic and their
rate of retweeting of messages generated by the campaign. Our analysis with
followers of multiple social-media campaigns found statistical significant
correlations between such sentiment and retweeting rate. Based on our analysis,
we have conducted an online intervention study among the followers of different
social-media campaigns. Our study shows that targeting followers based on their
sentiment towards the campaign can give higher retweet rate than a number of
other baseline approaches
The Missing Link: The Search for the Connection Between Young Americans for Freedom and Charles Willoughby
Last semester, Gettysburg College was abuzz with controversy over the ultra-conservative messages that the Young Americans for Freedom organization was spreading around campus. As the Compiler’s unofficial, wannabe muckraker, I wanted to dive into the discussion. My entry point was a rumor that a reactionary Gettysburg College alumnus helped establish the organization in the 1960s. I jumped at the opportunity to uncover the link. [excerpt
Reliable Spreading of messages in not eponymous systems
The broadcast service spreads a message m among all processes of the system, such that each process eventually delivers m. A basic broadcast service does not impose any delivery guarantee in a system with failures. Fault-tolerant broadcast is a fundamental problem in distributed systems that adds certainty in the delivery of messages when crashes can happen in the system. Traditionally, the fault-tolerant broadcast service has been studied in classical distributed systems when each process has a unique identity (eponymous system). In this paper we study the fault-tolerant broadcast service in anonymous systems, that is, in systems where all processes are indistinguishable
Information spreading during emergencies and anomalous events
The most critical time for information to spread is in the aftermath of a
serious emergency, crisis, or disaster. Individuals affected by such situations
can now turn to an array of communication channels, from mobile phone calls and
text messages to social media posts, when alerting social ties. These channels
drastically improve the speed of information in a time-sensitive event, and
provide extant records of human dynamics during and afterward the event.
Retrospective analysis of such anomalous events provides researchers with a
class of "found experiments" that may be used to better understand social
spreading. In this chapter, we study information spreading due to a number of
emergency events, including the Boston Marathon Bombing and a plane crash at a
western European airport. We also contrast the different information which may
be gleaned by social media data compared with mobile phone data and we estimate
the rate of anomalous events in a mobile phone dataset using a proposed anomaly
detection method.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure
On the Dynamics of Human Proximity for Data Diffusion in Ad-Hoc Networks
We report on a data-driven investigation aimed at understanding the dynamics
of message spreading in a real-world dynamical network of human proximity. We
use data collected by means of a proximity-sensing network of wearable sensors
that we deployed at three different social gatherings, simultaneously involving
several hundred individuals. We simulate a message spreading process over the
recorded proximity network, focusing on both the topological and the temporal
properties. We show that by using an appropriate technique to deal with the
temporal heterogeneity of proximity events, a universal statistical pattern
emerges for the delivery times of messages, robust across all the data sets.
Our results are useful to set constraints for generic processes of data
dissemination, as well as to validate established models of human mobility and
proximity that are frequently used to simulate realistic behaviors.Comment: A. Panisson et al., On the dynamics of human proximity for data
diffusion in ad-hoc networks, Ad Hoc Netw. (2011
POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths
Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to
spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam
include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of
these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these
defenses.
Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share
common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users
within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content
shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of
people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar
messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious
content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns.
In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that
leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages
on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our
system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that
our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91%
precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more
comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art
spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the
past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through
simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam
messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine
learning attacks
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