Building an alternative social currency: Dematerialising and rematerialising digital money across media

This paper reports on the user experience and design of physical and digital forms of a mixed-media local currency. We reconceive digitally mediated transactions as social interactions and report on the development of conceptual designs informed by user research and interactive workshops. Our findings show that use is strongly tied to conceptions of locality and community, markers of identity, information exchange and the digital and physical forms as tools for shaping interactions. The form of the currency can make the invisible visible, exposing our identities and values, business models, and the details of the transactions themselves. Our analysis stresses the need to provide opportunities for extending social interaction, making more local connections and deriving the best value from those connections, without insulating individuals from each other, or from the wider geographical context. Themes that emerged from the user research were visualized as conceptual designs for digitally augmented media, allowing us to explore the monetary transaction at three levels: the material, as interaction between two parties, and the context of the transaction.The RCUK Digital Economy theme (EP/K012304/1)

Cloaked Facebook pages: Exploring fake Islamist propaganda in social media

This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general. Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics

Search Rank Fraud De-Anonymization in Online Systems

We introduce the fraud de-anonymization problem, that goes beyond fraud detection, to unmask the human masterminds responsible for posting search rank fraud in online systems. We collect and study search rank fraud data from Upwork, and survey the capabilities and behaviors of 58 search rank fraudsters recruited from 6 crowdsourcing sites. We propose Dolos, a fraud de-anonymization system that leverages traits and behaviors extracted from these studies, to attribute detected fraud to crowdsourcing site fraudsters, thus to real identities and bank accounts. We introduce MCDense, a min-cut dense component detection algorithm to uncover groups of user accounts controlled by different fraudsters, and leverage stylometry and deep learning to attribute them to crowdsourcing site profiles. Dolos correctly identified the owners of 95% of fraudster-controlled communities, and uncovered fraudsters who promoted as many as 97.5% of fraud apps we collected from Google Play. When evaluated on 13,087 apps (820,760 reviews), which we monitored over more than 6 months, Dolos identified 1,056 apps with suspicious reviewer groups. We report orthogonal evidence of their fraud, including fraud duplicates and fraud re-posts.Comment: The 29Th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 201