Crowdturfers, Campaigns, and Social Media: Tracking and Revealing Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media

author: Kyumin Lee, Department of Computer Science, Utah State University
published: April 3, 2014,   recorded: July 2013,   views: 1735
Categories

Related content

Report a problem or upload files

If you have found a problem with this lecture or would like to send us extra material, articles, exercises, etc., please use our ticket system to describe your request and upload the data.
Enter your e-mail into the 'Cc' field, and we will keep you updated with your request's status.
Lecture popularity: You need to login to cast your vote.
  Delicious Bibliography

Description

Crowdturfing has recently been identified as a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing. Crowdturfers leverage human-powered crowdsourcing platforms to spread malicious URLs in social media, form "astroturf" campaigns, and manipulate search engines, ultimately degrading the quality of online information and threatening the usefulness of these systems. In this paper we present a framework for "pulling back the curtain" on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem. Concretely, we analyze the types of malicious tasks and the properties of requesters and workers in crowdsourcing sites such as Microworkers.com, ShortTask.com and Rapidworkers.com, and link these tasks (and their associated workers) on crowdsourcing sites to social media, by monitoring the activities of social media participants. Based on this linkage, we identify the relationship structure connecting these workers in social media, which can reveal the implicit power structure of crowdturfers identified on crowdsourcing sites. We identify three classes of crowdturfers -- professional workers, casual workers, and middlemen -- and we develop statistical user models to automatically differentiate these workers and regular social media users.

Link this page

Would you like to put a link to this lecture on your homepage?
Go ahead! Copy the HTML snippet !

Write your own review or comment:

make sure you have javascript enabled or clear this field: