Misinformation Resilient Search Rankings with Webgraph-based Interventions

The proliferation of unreliable news domains on the internet has had wide-reaching negative impacts on society. We introduce and evaluate interventions aimed at reducing traffic to unreliable news domains from search engines while maintaining traffic to reliable domains. We build these interventions on the principles of fairness (penalize sites for what is in their control), generality (label/fact-check agnostic), targeted (increase the cost of adversarial behavior), and scalability (works at webscale). We refine our methods on small-scale webdata as a testbed and then generalize the interventions to a large-scale webgraph containing 93.9M domains and 1.6B edges. We demonstrate that our methods penalize unreliable domains far more than reliable domains in both settings and we explore multiple avenues to mitigate unintended effects on both the small-scale and large-scale webgraph experiments. These results indicate the potential of our approach to reduce the spread of misinformation and foster a more reliable online information ecosystem. This research contributes to the development of targeted strategies to enhance the trustworthiness and quality of search engine results, ultimately benefiting users and the broader digital community.

Purpose in the Machine: Do Traffic Simulators Produce Distributionally Equivalent Outcomes for Reinforcement Learning Applications?

Traffic simulators are used to generate data for learning in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). A key question is to what extent their modelling assumptions affect the capabilities of ITSs to adapt to various scenarios when deployed in the real world. This work focuses on two simulators commonly used to train reinforcement learning (RL) agents for traffic applications, CityFlow and SUMO. A controlled virtual experiment varying driver behavior and simulation scale finds evidence against distributional equivalence in RL-relevant measures from these simulators, with the root mean squared error and KL divergence being significantly greater than 0 for all assessed measures. While granular real-world validation generally remains infeasible, these findings suggest that traffic simulators are not a deus ex machina for RL training: understanding the impacts of inter-simulator differences is necessary to train and deploy RL-based ITSs.

Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum

Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels-dot-is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.

A Weakly Supervised Classifier and Dataset of White Supremacist Language

We present a dataset and classifier for detecting the language of white supremacist extremism, a growing issue in online hate speech. Our weakly supervised classifier is trained on large datasets of text from explicitly white supremacist domains paired with neutral and anti-racist data from similar domains. We demonstrate that this approach improves generalization performance to new domains. Incorporating anti-racist texts as counterexamples to white supremacist language mitigates bias.

How Hate Speech Varies by Target Identity: A Computational Analysis

This paper investigates how hate speech varies in systematic ways according to the identities it targets. Across multiple hate speech datasets annotated for targeted identities, we find that classifiers trained on hate speech targeting specific identity groups struggle to generalize to other targeted identities. This provides empirical evidence for differences in hate speech by target identity; we then investigate which patterns structure this variation. We find that the targeted demographic category (e.g. gender/sexuality or race/ethnicity) appears to have a greater effect on the language of hate speech than does the relative social power of the targeted identity group. We also find that words associated with hate speech targeting specific identities often relate to stereotypes, histories of oppression, current social movements, and other social contexts specific to identities. These experiments suggest the importance of considering targeted identity, as well as the social contexts associated with these identities, in automated hate speech classification.

Multi-modal Networks Reveal Patterns of Operational Similarity of Terrorist Organizations

Capturing dynamics of operational similarity among terrorist groups is critical to provide actionable insights for counter-terrorism and intelligence monitoring. Yet, in spite of its theoretical and practical relevance, research addressing this problem is currently lacking. We tackle this problem proposing a novel computational framework for detecting clusters of terrorist groups sharing similar behaviors, focusing on groups' yearly repertoire of deployed tactics, attacked targets, and utilized weapons. Specifically considering those organizations that have plotted at least 50 attacks from 1997 to 2018, accounting for a total of 105 groups responsible for more than 42,000 events worldwide, we offer three sets of results. First, we show that over the years global terrorism has been characterized by increasing operational cohesiveness. Second, we highlight that year-to-year stability in co-clustering among groups has been particularly high from 2009 to 2018, indicating temporal consistency of similarity patterns in the last decade. Third, we demonstrate that operational similarity between two organizations is driven by three factors: (a) their overall activity; (b) the difference in the diversity of their operational repertoires; (c) the difference in a combined measure of diversity and activity. Groups' operational preferences, geographical homophily and ideological affinity have no consistent role in determining operational similarity.

RATE: Overcoming Noise and Sparsity of Textual Features in Real-Time Location Estimation

Real-time location inference of social media users is the fundamental of some spatial applications such as localized search and event detection. While tweet text is the most commonly used feature in location estimation, most of the prior works suffer from either the noise or the sparsity of textual features. In this paper, we aim to tackle these two problems. We use topic modeling as a building block to characterize the geographic topic variation and lexical variation so that "one-hot" encoding vectors will no longer be directly used. We also incorporate other features which can be extracted through the Twitter streaming API to overcome the noise problem. Experimental results show that our RATE algorithm outperforms several benchmark methods, both in the precision of region classification and the mean distance error of latitude and longitude regression.

Coordinating Narratives and the Capitol Riots on Parler

Coordinated disinformation campaigns are used to influence social media users, potentially leading to offline violence. In this study, we introduce a general methodology to uncover coordinated messaging through analysis of user parleys on Parler. The proposed method constructs a user-to-user coordination network graph induced by a user-to-text graph and a text-to-text similarity graph. The text-to-text graph is constructed based on the textual similarity of Parler posts. We study three influential groups of users in the 6 January 2020 Capitol riots and detect networks of coordinated user clusters that are all posting similar textual content in support of different disinformation narratives related to the U.S. 2020 elections.