TY - CHAP
T1 - Characterizing Pathogenic Social Media Accounts
AU - Alvari, Hamidreza
AU - Shaabani, Elham
AU - Shakarian, Paulo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Over the past years, political events and public opinion on the Web have been allegedly manipulated by “Pathogenic Social Media (PSM)” accounts dedicated to spreading disinformation and performing malicious activities. These accounts are often controlled by terrorist supporters, water armies, or fake news writers and hence can pose threats to social media and general public. Understanding and analyzing PSMs could help social media devise sophisticated techniques to stop them from reaching their audience and consequently reduce their threat. In this chapter, probabilistic causal inference and well-known statistical technique Hawkes processes are utilized to distinguish between PSM and non-PSM accounts. Results on real-world ISIS-related datasets from Twitter demonstrate that PSMs behave significantly differently from regular users while disseminating information.
AB - Over the past years, political events and public opinion on the Web have been allegedly manipulated by “Pathogenic Social Media (PSM)” accounts dedicated to spreading disinformation and performing malicious activities. These accounts are often controlled by terrorist supporters, water armies, or fake news writers and hence can pose threats to social media and general public. Understanding and analyzing PSMs could help social media devise sophisticated techniques to stop them from reaching their audience and consequently reduce their threat. In this chapter, probabilistic causal inference and well-known statistical technique Hawkes processes are utilized to distinguish between PSM and non-PSM accounts. Results on real-world ISIS-related datasets from Twitter demonstrate that PSMs behave significantly differently from regular users while disseminating information.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-61431-7_2
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-61431-7_2
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85101060433
T3 - SpringerBriefs in Computer Science
SP - 9
EP - 28
BT - SpringerBriefs in Computer Science
PB - Springer
ER -