/news-archive/tag/social-bots/ 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Fri, 25 May 2018 16:25:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 /news-archive/2018/05/25/tech-demo/ Fri, 25 May 2018 16:25:16 +0000 /news/?p=70673 ... 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock professor joins program to fight the spread of foreign propaganda]]> University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and social media infiltration expert Dr. Nitin Agarwal has been selected as a member of the U.S. State Department鈥檚 Tech Demo program to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.聽 Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science, leads (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock. Agarwal鈥檚 team of researchers is one of 14 groups throughout the country that is participating in the program, which is organized by the that is charged with leading the U.S. government鈥檚 efforts to counter propaganda and disinformation from international terrorist organizations and foreign countries. During the next six months, those participating in the program will be invited to present their research to U.S. State Department officials, who are expected to visit 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in November. Agarwal and COSMOS researchers will showcase technologies like Blogtrackers and YouTube trackers, one of COSMOS鈥� latest applications. These applications track information providers and narratives as misinformation is disseminated through social media networks including blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. The research is the result of projects supported by millions of dollars in federal grants. YouTube trackers demonstrates expansion in COSMOS鈥� research goals from understanding how people consume media via reading to including viewing-oriented information consumption. 鈥淭he younger generations consume information more by viewing than reading, so they are becoming susceptible to disinformation that is prevalent on video-based social media platforms,鈥� he said. The key to the success of programs like Blogtrackers and YouTube trackers is developing efficient algorithms that can quickly sift through massive amounts of social media data, but also target the right signals, Agarwal said. 鈥淭here are often two main motivations for using YouTube,鈥� he said. 鈥淥ne motivation is monetization. People can make a lot of money off of YouTube, so they want their content displayed in as many places as possible. The second motivation is manipulation. There are also malicious or adversarial actors who eventually want to steer your thinking toward a specific agenda. Once you know the intent of the users, we can pick up the right signals to acquire relevant data.鈥� Algorithmic warfare is becoming an increasingly hot topic as companies like Google, Twitter, and YouTube have realized that the algorithms they use to search and recommend content to their users are susceptible to manipulation by outside forces, Agarwal said. As an example, hackers could target Google鈥檚 search algorithms to make a website with false information appear higher in search results, therefore making the website look legitimate. Agarwal attended the technology series鈥� kickoff event May 2 at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs spoke at the event and emphasized the importance of this initiative as a way that the government is working with private industry to stem the spread of false narratives and to authenticate emerging information. 鈥淔oreign propaganda and disinformation clearly is not a new problem,鈥� Nauert said. 鈥淗owever, the same technology that has put an ever-growing crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the hands of anyone with an internet connection, has also put a multimedia storyteller in almost everyone鈥檚 pocket. It is not always clear which messages may be sponsored by foreign governments or non-state actors. In this charged atmosphere, information 鈥� or more frequently its weaponized counterpart, disinformation 鈥� is emerging as the secret weapon used by our adversaries to tip the scales. We are at a crucial moment when we must define the problem and develop effective solutions consistent with the rule of law and our democratic norms and values. And we need the folks in this room to help us in that endeavor.鈥�]]> /news-archive/2018/05/24/social-bots-natural-disasters/ Thu, 24 May 2018 13:01:28 +0000 /news/?p=70649 ... Social bots disrupt online communication about natural disasters]]> Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock are studying how social bots influence the delivery of news via social media during major disasters.聽 The study examines the role of social bots – automated Twitter accounts that attempt to affect or influence the behaviors of others – and their coordination and communication patterns with complex organizational structures to disseminate information during four natural disasters that occurred in 2017. The paper, 鈥淎nalyzing Social Bots and their Coordination during Natural Disasters,鈥� will be discussed at the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation to be held July 10-13 in Washington D.C. , a Ph.D. student in computer and information science at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, is the lead author who will present the paper. She is also a researcher at (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) 鈥� a research group led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science. Khaund also presented this work at the 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Student Research and Creative Works Showcase and was awarded first place in the graduate student technology division. The paper鈥檚 co-authors include Dr. Samer Al-Khateeb, a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, Dr., a research project analyst at the office of Medicaid Inspector General and a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, and Agarwal. Researchers collected data from Twitter during Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria as well as the 7.1-magnitude Central Mexico earthquake that killed 370 people on Sept. 19, 2017. The study resulted in the collection of more than 1.2 million tweets generated by more than 800,000 Twitter accounts. The researchers detected the presence of social bots in the collected dataset and studied the social networks of the top ranked bot accounts as well as the top ranked non-bot accounts (humans) and then compared both networks. They discovered that social bots, which evolve constantly and become more sophisticated as time progresses, can disrupt discourse in online spaces. While humans have more tightly knit online communities, social bots tend to make rather weaker connections that result in a lack of a sense of belonging in the online community. Analysis of their content revealed that the discourse was not just limited to the disaster events. Non-relevant hashtags including hoaxes and alternate narratives were latched on to the event-specific hashtags and were disseminated in Spanish, Arabic, French, and Japanese, among other languages. In future research, COSMOS investigators hope to understand the different strategies that social bots use to coordinate disinformation campaigns in which online discourse is successfully manipulated. The research is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Maulden-Entergy endowment at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. Researchers gratefully acknowledge the support. ]]> /news-archive/2017/10/02/agarwal-receives-230000-assist-u-s-department-defense-social-bot-detection/ Mon, 02 Oct 2017 13:31:12 +0000 /news/?p=68097 ... Agarwal receives $230,000 to assist U.S. Department of Defense in social bot detection]]> Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair of Information Science, received the grant to develop a socio-computational model for the (DARPA) to detect the online presence of social bots. These bots automatically generate messages that persuade social media users on particular issues, ideas, and campaigns. Agarwal is working with, a company based in Rockville, Maryland, that specializes in research and development for federal agencies and corporations in the United States. Agarwal will work on multiple tasks to better understand how social bots have affected public discourse at a social and computational level. These tasks include identifying specific cases in which these bots have affected information and data collection, examining the computational framework of bots, discovering what a bot can and cannot do in a social media space, and developing behavior models to identify strategies in which bots are used. “It is vital to study these rapidly evolving cyber warfare tactics to understand influence operations conducted on social media that distort public discourse, weaponize narratives, and fabricate perceptions,” Agarwal said. “In this project, we will develop and perfect methodologies informed by social science and computational social network analysis to study the information dissemination and coordination behaviors of social bots and to aid the development of detection tools ready for deployment in cyber operations.” In the next phase of the project, Agarwal will explore the content that social bots create, map their behavior, and explore their effectiveness in information campaigns.]]>