Disinformation in Open Online Media : First Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2019, Hamburg, Germany, February 27 {u2013} March 1, 2019, Revised Selected Papers

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2019, held in Hamburg, Germany, in February/March 2019. The 14 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: human computer interaction and disinformation, automation and disinformation, media and disinformation. Preface Opening Remarks Organization Contents Human Computer Interaction and Disinformation Human and Algorithmic Contributions to Misinformation Online - Identifying the Culprit 1 Introduction 2 Opinions, Information, and Misinformation 3 Humans as a Culprit in Spreading Misinformation 3.1 Opinion Formation and Media Effects 3.2 Use of Social Media 3.3 Cognitive Biases 4 Algorithms as a Culprit in Spreading Misinformation 4.1 Recommender Systems 4.2 Recommendation Metrics 4.3 User Experience in Recommender Systems 4.4 Interactive Recommender Systems 4.5 Novel Approaches to Recommender Systems 5 Discussion References Between Overload and Indifference: Detection of Fake Accounts and Social Bots by Community Managers 1 Introduction 2 Identifying Features of Social Bots and Fake Accounts 3 Guarding the Gates Against Intruders: The Journalists’ Need to Defend Their Platforms 4 Method 4.1 Participant Selection and Sample 5 Results 5.1 Journalistic Detection Strategies of Fake Accounts and Social Bots 5.2 How Do Journalists Define and Evaluate Fake Accounts and Social Bots? 6 Conclusion References Use and Assessment of Sources in Conspiracy Theorists’ Communities 1 Introduction 2 Research Questions 3 Method and Data 4 Results 5 Limitations 6 Conclusion References Credibility Development with Knowledge Graphs 1 Executive Summary 2 Literature Review 3 Building and Extending the Knowledge Graph 3.1 Global Knowledge Resources 3.2 Local Knowledge Extraction 3.3 Knowledge Representation 4 Credibility Assessment 4.1 Building the Attribution Graph 4.2 Calculating on Confidence 4.3 Belief Propagation on a Toy Example 5 Experiments 5.1 Belief Propagation Reliability on a Synthetic Dataset 5.2 Credibility Assessment on the Fake News Challenge Dataset 6 Conclusions References Automated Detection of Nostalgic Text in the Context of Societal Pessimism 1 Motivation 2 Nostalgia as an Emotional Concept 3 Nostalgia as an Instrument 4 Methodology 4.1 Data Collection 4.2 Feature Extraction 4.3 Text Classification 4.4 Classifier Performance and Results 5 Classification of User-Comments in Online Media 6 Conclusion and Future Work References What Is Abusive Language? 1 The Issue of Abusive Online User Comments 2 Prior Work and Definitional Approaches 3 A Configurable, Multi-view Approach to Abusive Language Definitions 3.1 Extracting Definitional Information from Dictionaries 3.2 Extracting Definitional Information from Literature 3.3 Extracting Definitional Information from Legal Texts 3.4 Extracting Definitional Information from Guidelines 4 Test-Case: Europe 4.1 Dictionary-Based View 4.2 Literature-Based View 4.3 Law-Based View 4.4 Synopsis 5 Conclusion and Outlook for the Testcase of Germany References Automation and Disinformation Detecting Malicious Social Bots: Story of a Never-Ending Clash 1 Introduction 2 Traditional Social Bot Detection 3 The Issue of Bot Evolution 4 Modern Social Bot Detection 5 The Way Ahead 6 Conclusions References The Markets of Manipulation: The Trading of Social Bots on Clearnet and Darknet Markets 1 Motivation 2 The Manipulation Infrastructure 2.1 Pseudo-Users and Social Bots 2.2 Underground Markets for Social Bots 2.3 Research Questions 3 Data Acquisition 4 Results 4.1 Trading Venues 4.2 Commodities 4.3 Price Levels 5 Discussion 5.1 Limitations and Future Research Directions 5.2 Conclusion Appendix References Inside the Tool Set of Automation: Free Social Bot Code Revisited 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 3 Data Acquisition 4 Descriptive Analysis 4.1 Data Overview 4.2 Geospatial Analysis 5 Topic Modeling 6 Conclusion and Future Work References Analysis of Account Engagement in Onsetting Twitter Message Cascades 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 3 Research Questions 4 Data Acquisition and Evaluation Methods 4.1 Selection of Observed Root Accounts 4.2 Technical Aspects of Data Collection 4.3 Notation and Measures 5 Results and Observation 5.1 Data Description 5.2 Data Analysis 5.3 Analysis of Possible Automation Artefacts 6 Discussion 7 Conclusion References Media and Disinformation How Facebook and Google Accidentally Created a Perfect Ecosystem for Targeted Disinformation 1 Introduction: Online Media Curation and Disinformation 1.1 Conceptual Overview: The New Gatekeepers or - What’s Considered Relevant Content These Days? 1.2 A Stabbing in Chemnitz and a Social Media Storm 2 What Is Relevance? 2.1 What’s Relevant? News Factors then and Now 2.2 User Engagement as a New Relevancy Signal 2.3 The Influence of the Users: Who Is Engaging? 2.4 User Interface Design and the Psychology of Cognitive Heuristics 3 User Signals and Their Effects on Content Curation 3.1 Example No. 1: Facebook 3.2 Example No. 2: Google’s Search Engine 3.3 Example No. 3: YouTube 4 Summary and Conclusion: Disinformation Spreading as Collateral Damage References Between Mainstream and Alternative – Co-orientation in Right-Wing Populist Alternative News Media 1 Introduction 2 Alternative News Media 3 Co-orientation 4 Case Study “The Honey Man” – A Spy-Glass into the Right-Wing Populist Blogosphere 5 Analytical Strategy 6 Results 6.1 Source Types Between National Newspapers and Professional Truthers 6.2 Dominant Voices 6.3 Stylistic Versus Content-Related Co-orientation - Mapping the Spectrum 7 General Discussion 7.1 Limitations and Directions for Future Research 7.2 Conclusion References Maintaining Journalistic Authority 1 Introduction 2 The Media, the Journalist and ‘Post-truth Era’ 2.1 Fake News 2.2 Fact-Checking Journalism 3 Nigerian Media Landscape and CrossCheck Nigeria Model 4 Data Collection 4.1 Method 4.2 Analysis 5 Findings 5.1 The Technological Expertise of Nigerian Newsrooms 5.2 Access to Sources 5.3 Purveyors of Real-Life Events 5.4 Mastery of Knowledge 6 Discussion 7 Limitations and Agenda for Future Study 8 Conclusion References State Propaganda on Twitter 1 Introduction 2 Propaganda on Social Media 3 Computational Propaganda and Social Bots 4 Regional Rivalry Between Iran and Saudi Arabia 5 Data Sample and Analysis 5.1 Descriptive Analysis 5.2 Retweet Network 5.3 Limitations 6 Conclusion References Author Index