arXiv subjects

Tanushree Mitra

Publications and source records attributed to Tanushree Mitra.

40 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

What Makes People Join Conspiracy Communities?: Role of Social Factors in Conspiracy Engagement

Widespread conspiracy theories, like those motivating anti-vaccination attitudes or climate change denial, propel collective action and bear society-wide consequences. Yet, empirical research has largely studied conspiracy theory adoption as an individual pursuit, rather than as a socially mediated process. What makes users join communities endorsing and spreading conspiracy theories? We leverage longitudinal data from 56 conspiracy communities on Reddit to compare individual and social factors determining which users join the communities. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we first identify 30K future conspiracists-(FC) and 30K matched non-conspiracists-(NC). We then provide empirical evidence of importance of social factors across six dimensions relative to the individual factors by analyzing 6 million Reddit comments and posts. Specifically in social factors, we find that dyadic interactions with members of the conspiracy communities and marginalization outside of the conspiracy communities, are the most important social precursors to conspiracy joining-even outperforming individual factor baselines. Our results offer quantitative backing to understand social processes and echo chamber effects in conspiratorial engagement, with important implications for democratic institutions and online communities.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Investigating Differences in Crowdsourced News Credibility Assessment: Raters, Tasks, and Expert Criteria

Misinformation about critical issues such as climate change and vaccine safety is oftentimes amplified on online social and search platforms. The crowdsourcing of content credibility assessment by laypeople has been proposed as one strategy to combat misinformation by attempting to replicate the assessments of experts at scale. In this work, we investigate news credibility assessments by crowds versus experts to understand when and how ratings between them differ. We gather a dataset of over 4,000 credibility assessments taken from 2 crowd groups---journalism students and Upwork workers---as well as 2 expert groups---journalists and scientists---on a varied set of 50 news articles related to climate science, a topic with widespread disconnect between public opinion and expert consensus. Examining the ratings, we find differences in performance due to the makeup of the crowd, such as rater demographics and political leaning, as well as the scope of the tasks that the crowd is assigned to rate, such as the genre of the article and partisanship of the publication. Finally, we find differences between expert assessments due to differing expert criteria that journalism versus science experts use---differences that may contribute to crowd discrepancies, but that also suggest a way to reduce the gap by designing crowd tasks tailored to specific expert criteria. From these findings, we outline future research directions to better design crowd processes that are tailored to specific crowds and types of content.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Online Social Deception and Its Countermeasures for Trustworthy Cyberspace: A Survey

We are living in an era when online communication over social network services (SNSs) have become an indispensable part of people's everyday lives. As a consequence, online social deception (OSD) in SNSs has emerged as a serious threat in cyberspace, particularly for users vulnerable to such cyberattacks. Cyber attackers have exploited the sophisticated features of SNSs to carry out harmful OSD activities, such as financial fraud, privacy threat, or sexual/labor exploitation. Therefore, it is critical to understand OSD and develop effective countermeasures against OSD for building a trustworthy SNSs. In this paper, we conducted an extensive survey, covering (i) the multidisciplinary concepts of social deception; (ii) types of OSD attacks and their unique characteristics compared to other social network attacks and cybercrimes; (iii) comprehensive defense mechanisms embracing prevention, detection, and response (or mitigation) against OSD attacks along with their pros and cons; (iv) datasets/metrics used for validation and verification; and (v) legal and ethical concerns related to OSD research. Based on this survey, we provide insights into the effectiveness of countermeasures and the lessons from existing literature. We conclude this survey paper with an in-depth discussions on the limitations of the state-of-the-art and recommend future research directions in this area.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2016

Credibility and Dynamics of Collective Attention

Today, social media provide the means by which billions of people experience news and events happening around the world. However, the absence of traditional journalistic gatekeeping allows information to flow unencumbered through these platforms, often raising questions of veracity and credibility of the reported information. Here we ask: How do the dynamics of collective attention directed toward an event reported on social media vary with its perceived credibility? By examining the first large-scale, systematically tracked credibility database of public Twitter messages (47M messages corresponding to 1,138 real-world events over a span of three months), we established a relationship between the temporal dynamics of events reported on social media and their associated level of credibility judgments. Representing collective attention by the aggregate temporal signatures of an event reportage, we found that the amount of continued attention focused on an event provides information about its associated levels of perceived credibility. Events exhibiting sustained, intermittent bursts of attention were found to be associated with lower levels of perceived credibility. In other words, as more people showed interest during moments of transient collective attention, the associated uncertainty surrounding these events also increased.

cs.SI↗