Social Media Research to Combat Disinformation and Foreign Influence
Abstract
Social media is proven to be an effective lens for understanding users likes, opinions, habits, intension, and behaviors. With social media, ones network grows larger and faster, more friends are made, better recommendations are offered, and more information of relevance is delivered. However, disinformation is also rampant as social media is an open space of which organizationsor individuals of different interests may take advantage to advance their own agendas. The rapid growth of social media data significantly improves social media intelligence while disinformation on social media can also become viral with the aggravated presence of bots, trolls, shills, and crowdturfing. The recent surge of AI techniques and pervasive use of machine learning algorithms clearly demonstrate that AI is a double-edged sword: it automates many labor-intensive tasks, but also helps make disinformation more difficult to detect and exacerbateecho chambers and filter bubbles as we are faced with big data and information overload. This proposal aims to address the need for novel algorithms and improved software systems in combating disinformation. Much of the past work in social media has been tightly tied to computer science efforts with a significant lack of integration with disciplines related to human behavior. Researchers in information science, journalism and media, social science, and evolving interdisciplinary work on understanding the connection between online and offline behavior. This effort will provide for new algorithms and capabilities to facilitate interdisciplinary research for future model development and new techniques that enable basic and applied research in cyber-social behavior.The proposed research and development consists of three major technical components to improve social media research for combating disinformation and foreign influence: (a) research and develop advanced capabilities of detecting disinformation using social media data and extract auxiliary information such as comments, retweets, likes, and provenance, (b) research on disinformation and emotional arousal for mitigating its impact on highly emotional, social conflict issues and violent extremism, and (c) develop state-of-the-art technologies forcollaborative research on these issues with social scientists, operations research and information scientists, and computational social scientists, to engage graduate and undergraduate students in social media research and analysis.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 06, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142114002
Entities
People
- Huan Liu
Organizations
- Arizona State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy