Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Small: Detecting Accounts Involved in Influence Campaigns on Social Media

The growing popularity of online social networks has opened the door to false information being disseminated by malicious actors. Hostile nation states are orchestrating disinformation campaigns in the United States with the goal of influencing public discourse or pushing talking points that favor a particular country’s agenda. These campaigns are typically carried out with the help of fake social media accounts known as trolls, which pose as fictitious personas.

These trolls interact with each other and with unsuspecting social network users with the goal of polarizing discussion and furthering false narratives. Despite the serious threat that disinformation poses to our society, social networks are struggling to keep up with the threat, resorting to reactive measures that remove malicious accounts after the fact.

The goal of this project is to develop techniques able to automatically identify troll accounts on social networks so that they can be more swiftly removed.

To carry out this project, the investigators are collecting information about the troll accounts identified by Twitter and Reddit as belonging to several foreign countries’ disinformation campaigns. These data are used to train machine learning algorithms able to automatically identify other troll accounts on Twitter and Reddit. The project follows two parallel research tasks.

In the first task, the research team aims to train supervised learning algorithms to learn the typical behavior of known troll accounts, with the goal of identifying more accounts that behave similarly and are therefore part of the same disinformation campaign. Preliminary results show that troll accounts exhibit peculiar interaction patterns that are uncommon in real accounts.

In the second task, the researchers will work towards identifying traits that are typical of troll accounts regardless of the campaign that they belong to, and use transfer learning techniques to identify emerging disinformation campaigns. Students are involved at all stages of the research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.