Autori: Armenia S, Sellitto G
Tipologia Prodotto: Abstract in Atti di convegno
Titolo della Rivista: Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS 2014)
Anno di Pubblicazione: 2014
Abstract:
Detecting social engineering, opinion manipulation and sentiment hijacking in massive online communities. Social network platforms and the cyber space are social spaces where the agents (human agents and possibly programmatic BOTs) generate, exchange, diffuse and debate contents, information and opinions. A massive online social network, unlike corporate organizations or social entities like groups, parties, families has no a-priori well-defined organizational structure, so often we have no clue to decide if a user is lawfully interacting with the platform. The repeated interaction between the agents leads to the emergence of roles and any group of users is entitled to express their opinion on the platform. The dynamics of coalitions’ formation are part of the evolution of the network, though some agents can leverage social engineering at the level of social groups’ dynamics to influence opinions or to steer the social dynamics towards some desired and possibly malicious objectives. We apply dynamic social network analysis to discover the co-evolution of the sematic network made up by the contents, opinions and their relations, and of the agents’ network embracing, producing and reshaping the contents. Based on this paradigm, what are the possibilities that some agents succeed in diverting the attention or in hijacking the opinions and the sentiments of the other users? How likely is that the information that reach us are manipulated or filtered, that some apparently valuable pieces of information are no more than an advertisement channelled through a large number of Bots mimicking human users? The development of a cyber-environment thus produces a new scenario where the tactics of Captology (B.J. Fogg, 2003) and the spread of social engineering can represent an efficient toolbox to support and drive the criminal strategies of never seen before hostile organized and globalized entities.