Demystifying Social Media Manipulation and Calling for Interdisciplinary, International Collaboration

Summary

The study aimed to analyze the manipulation landscape on social media comprehensively. It views insights from various disciplines, looking for primary elements of social media manipulation, including false claims, bots, and malicious behavior. The study identifies commonalities and emphasizes the need for collaborative, interdisciplinary research to counter social media manipulations.

Key Findings

The key findings of the study on social media manipulation are as follows:

• The study identified three primary elements of social media manipulation (SMM): false information, bots, and malicious campaigns. These elements coexist and contribute to the spread of misinformation and manipulation on online social networks (OSNs).

  

  Figure 1: Network features are paramount for detection, though researchers avoid it due to data collection time and resource constraints.

• The research highlighted the urgent need for interdisciplinary research to combat social media manipulations effectively. It emphasized the importance of integrating insights from various disciplines to understand the manipulation landscape comprehensively.

• Researchers systematically reviewed prior research, extracting insights and raising questions for future research.

• The findings emphasized the role of user psychology, the prevalence of bots, and their tactics in relation to information manipulation.

• The study proposed a framework for assessing the intent and strategy used by adversaries in social media manipulation.

Implications

• Interdisciplinary research: The study highlights the need for interdisciplinary research to effectively combat social media manipulation. Given the interconnected nature of different elements of social media manipulation, researchers from various disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and sociology, must collaborate to develop comprehensive solutions.

• Safety and integrity of platforms: Social media platforms should take proactive measures to detect and mitigate false information, bots, and malicious campaigns to protect their users from manipulation and maintain the trustworthiness of their platforms.

• Critical infrastructure: The study suggests that OSNs should be considered part of critical infrastructure. As social media manipulation can have significant social and economic consequences, protecting OSNs from manipulation becomes crucial to prevent potential national fallout.

  • It could even be an obligation of nation-states to ensure adversaries don’t drown out citizen voices.

• Research gaps and future directions: The study calls for further research to incorporate different interdisciplinary viewpoints and explore the interplay between different manipulation elements. The findings also raise interesting questions for future research, providing directions for researchers to develop more robust solutions against social media manipulations.

Source

Akhtar MM, Masood R, Ikram M, Kanhere SS. False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations. arXiv [cs.SI]. 2023. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2308.12497