Revealing Censored Information Through Comments and Commenters in Online Social Networks

Cascavilla, Giuseppe; Conti, Mauro; Schwartz, David G.; Yahav, Inbal

doi:10.1145/2808797.2809290

Cited by 8 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The steps from comment identification to identity revelation are labor intensive. We are currently pursuing efforts to automate this process through techniques that reveal and cross‐reference the friend subnetworks of L‐classified commenters, with initial results reported previously (Cascavilla, Conti, Schwartz, & Yahav, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

News censorship in online social networks: A study of circumvention in the commentsphere

Schwartz

Yahav

Silverman

2016

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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This study investigates the interplay between online news, reader comments, and social networks to detect and characterize comments leading to the revelation of censored information. Censorship of identity occurs in different contexts-for example, the military censors the identity of personnel and the judiciary censors the identity of minors and victims. We address three objectives: (a) assess the relevance of identity censorship in the presence of user-generated comments, (b) understand the fashion of censorship circumvention (what people say and how), and (c) determine how comment analysis can aid in identifying decensorship and information leakage through comments. After examining 3,582 comments made on 48 articles containing obfuscated terms, we find that a systematic examination of comments can compromise identity censorship. We identify and categorize information leakage in comments indicative of knowledge of censored information that may result in information decensorship. We show that the majority of censored articles contained at least one comment leading to censorship circumvention.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

News censorship in online social networks: A study of circumvention in the commentsphere

Schwartz

Yahav

Silverman

2016

Asso for Info Science & Tech

Self Cite

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“…In addition, AdWords further refines the campaign an advertiser would like to launch, by giving her the possibility to reach exactly the audience she is looking for, specifying a list of websites users should have visited before being exposed to the campaign. Having visited such websites let users be part of custom affinity audiences 6 . To represent the relation between topics, interests and audiences, we refer to Figure 3.…”

Section: The Google Targeted Advertising Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More broadly, one can run campaigns in order to infer age or gender distribution of employees of particular companies, estimate the amount of time employees spend on Facebook, the fraction of employees who are interested in job opportunities elsewhere, etc. Similarly, in [6], [7], Cascavilla et al show several techniques to retrieve supposedly hidden information from Facebook user profile, while they do not rely on advertisements.…”

Section: ) Privacy Violationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

TRAP: Using Targeted ads to unveil Google personal profiles

Conti¹,

Cozza²,

Petrocchi³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)

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“…Also, the names of the victims of particularly hateful offences, like rapes and abuses on minors, are typically obfuscated, as for regulations dictated by law. Finally, a peculiar practice when publishing Israeli military-related news on social media is the veiling of the identities of public officers (e.g., Corporal S., rather than the explicit identity of such officer, see, e.g., [2]). However, as highlighted by recent literature [3], given the essential nature of social networking, the "non identification alone is ineffective in protecting sensitive information".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This work places itself amongst a few ones, like, e.g., [4,2] that investigate to which extent the connections among news articles, comments, and social media influence the effectiveness of identities censorship procedures. In particular, we present a novel approach to unveil a censored identity in a news post, by exploiting the fact that, on the social Web, it is not unusual to find the same content, or a very similar one, published elsewhere, e.g., by another publisher with different censorship policies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who framed Roger Reindeer? De-censorship of Facebook posts by snippet classification

Vigna

Petrocchi

Tommasi³

et al. 2018

Online Social Networks and Media

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This paper considers online news censorship and it concentrates on censorship of identities. Obfuscating identities may occur for disparate reasons, from military to judiciary ones. In the majority of cases, this happens to protect individuals from being identified and persecuted by hostile people. However, being the collaborative web characterised by a redundancy of information, it is not unusual that the same fact is reported by multiple sources, which may not apply the same restriction policies in terms of censorship. Also, the proven aptitude of social network users to disclose personal information leads to the phenomenon that comments to news can reveal the data withheld in the news itself. This gives us a mean to figure out who the subject of the censored news is. We propose an adaptation of a text analysis approach to unveil censored identities. The approach is tested on a synthesised scenario, which however resembles a real use case. Leveraging a text analysis based on a context classifier trained over snippets from posts and comments of Facebook pages, we achieve promising results. Despite the quite constrained settings in which we operate -such as considering only snippets of very short length -our system successfully detects the censored name, choosing among 10 different candidate names, in more than 50% of the investigated cases. This outperforms the results of two reference baselines. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported by a thorough experimental methodology and interesting on their own, also pave the way for further investigation on the insidious issues of censorship on the web.

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Revealing Censored Information Through Comments and Commenters in Online Social Networks

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

News censorship in online social networks: A study of circumvention in the commentsphere

News censorship in online social networks: A study of circumvention in the commentsphere

TRAP: Using Targeted ads to unveil Google personal profiles

Who framed Roger Reindeer? De-censorship of Facebook posts by snippet classification

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