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July 23, 2020 01:00 pm

AI System Detects Posts By Foreign 'Trolls' On Facebook and Twitter

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Foreign manipulation campaigns on social media can be spotted by looking at clues in the timing and length of posts and the URLs they contain, researchers have found. Now researchers say they have developed an automated machine learning system -- a type of artificial intelligence -- that can spot such posts, based on their content. Writing in the journal Science Advances, the team report how they carried out their work using posts from four known social media campaigns that targeted the U.S., attributed to China, Russia and Venezuela. After training the system on a subset of the data, the team explored five different questions. These included whether the machine learning system could tell apart posts from trolls and those linked to normal activity, and whether feeding the system with troll posts from one month would allow it to spot posts made during the following month by new troll accounts. The results show that the approach worked well, with the posts flagged by the system generally coming from trolls. However, not all troll posts were identified by the system. The team also found differences in the system's performance depending on the country behind the campaign, with Chinese activity easier to spot than Russian activity. "In terms of the Venezuelan campaigns, our performance is near-perfect; close to 99% accurate," said one of the researchers. "In terms of the Chinese one, our performance is around 90%, 91%. The Russian was the most complicated and most sophisticated campaign: our performance was around 85%."

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