Sihyung Lee, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 29-39, Jun. 2020
10.7472/jksii.2020.21.3.29, Full Text:
Keywords: Opinion Manipulation, online communities, Temporal Analysis, clustering

Abstract

Online communities, such as Internet portal sites and social media, have become popular since they allow users to share opinions and to obtain information anytime, anywhere. Accordingly, an increasing number of opinions are manipulated to the advantage of particular groups or individuals, and these opinions include falsified product reviews and political propaganda. Existing detection systems are built upon the characteristics of manipulated opinions for one particular time period. However, manipulation tactics change over time to evade detection systems and to more efficiently spread information, so detection systems should also evolve according to the changes. We therefore propose a system that helps observe and trace changes in manipulation tactics. This system classifies opinions into clusters that represent different tactics, and changes in these clusters reveal evolving tactics. We evaluated the system with over a million opinions collected during three election campaigns and found various changes in (i) the times when manipulations frequently occur, (ii) the methods to manipulate recommendation counts, and (iii) the use of multiple user IDs. We suggest that the operators of online communities perform regular audits with the proposed system to identify evolutions and to adjust detection systems.

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