Improving the Moderation of False Information and Influence Campaigns on Social Media

ABSTRACT

With false information flourishing on social media, online platforms have been deploying mitigations like attaching warning labels to problematic posts and suspending inauthentic accounts used to carry out coordinated campaigns. Carrying out these mitigation actions in an automated fashion, however, presents serious technical challenges, resulting in the majority of false content remaining unmoderated. In this talk, I will present my group's efforts in developing tools to identify false content and inauthentic accounts. These tools allow us to recommend social media posts that should receive soft moderation, to identify false and misleading images posted online, and to detect inauthentic social network accounts that are likely involved in state-sponsored influence campaigns. I will then discuss our research on understanding the potentially unwanted consequences of suspending misbehaving users on social media.

BIOGRAPHY

Gianluca Stringhini is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and    Computer Engineering Department at Boston University, holding affiliate appointments in the Computer Science Department and in the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. In his research Gianluca applies a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet. Through the collection and analysis of large-scale datasets, he develops novel and robust mitigation techniques to make the Internet a safer place. Over the years, Gianluca has worked on understanding and mitigating malicious activities like malware, online fraud, influence operations, and coordinated online harassment. He received multiple prizes including an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, and his research won multiple Best Paper Awards. Gianluca has published over 150 peer reviewed papers including several in top computer security conferences like IEEE Security and Privacy, CCS, NDSS, and USENIX Security, as well as top measurement, HCI, and Web conferences such as IMC, ICWSM, CHI, CSCW, and WWW.