Sihyung Lee, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 21, No. 6, pp. 57-69, Dec. 2020
10.7472/jksii.2020.21.6.57, Full Text:
Keywords: Opinion Manipulation, Online Community, Interest Group, Political manipulation

Abstract

As more people share their opinions in online communities, such as Internet portals and social networking services, more opinions are manipulated for the benefit of particular individuals and groups. In particular, when manipulations occur for political purposes, they influence election results as well as government policies and the quality of life. This type of manipulation has targeted the general public, and their analysis and detection has also focused on such manipulation. However, to more efficiently spread propaganda, recent manipulations have targeted common interest groups(e.g., a group of those interested in real estate) and propagated information whose content and style are customized to those groups. This work characterizes such manipulations on common interest groups and proposes method to detect manipulations. To this end, we collected and analyzed opinions posted on 10 common interest groups before and after an election. As a result, we found that manipulations on common interest groups indeed occurred and were gradually increasing toward the election date. We also proposed a detection system that examines individual opinions, their authors, and their collaborators. Using the collected opinions, we demonstrated that the proposed system can accurately classify more than 90% of manipulated opinions and that many of these opinions were posted by multiple collaborators. We believe that regular audits of opinions using the proposed system can quickly isolate manipulations and decrease their impact. Moreover, the proposed features can be used to identify manipulations in domains other than politics.

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