Understanding Malicious Accounts in Online Political Discussions: A Multilayer Network Approach

Abstract

Online social media platforms play an important role in political communication where users can freely express and exchange their political opinion. Political entities have leveraged social media platforms as essential channels to disseminate information, interact with voters, and even influence public opinion. For this purpose, some organizations may create one or more accounts to join online political discussions. Using these accounts, they could promote candidates and attack competitors. To avoid such misleading speeches and improve the transparency of the online society, spotting such malicious accounts and understanding their behaviors are crucial issues. In this paper, we aim to use network-based analysis to sense influential human-operated malicious accounts who attempt to manipulate public opinion on political discussion forums. To this end, we collected the election-related articles and malicious accounts from the prominent Taiwan discussion forum spanning from 25 May 2018 to 11 January 2020 (the election day). We modeled the discussion network as a multilayer network and used various centrality measures to sense influential malicious accounts not only in a single-layer but also across different layers of the network. Moreover, community analysis was performed to discover prominent communities and their characteristics for each layer of the network. The results demonstrate that our proposed method can successfully identify several influential malicious accounts and prominent communities with apparent behavior differences from others.

Hidden Markov-based path prediction method for malicious attacks in wireless sensor networks

“…In formula (8), ℎ indicates the number of interrelationships. Then, on the basis of formula (8), the expression formula for the interrelationship function is derived as follows:…”

“…Due to the need for timeliness of data and information, the two threats of malicious delays and replay attacks in wireless sensor networks need to be addressed in a timely manner. In order to be able to effectively enhance the availability of limited resources, the problem of resource depletion caused by malicious nodes should also be avoided [7][8]. The use of public key operations is abandoned after due consideration of both security and energy saving factors.…”

Investigating the COVID-19 vaccine discussions on Twitter through a multilayer network-based approach

“…The authors in Nguyen, Wang, Dai, and Dow (2021) investigated the impact of malicious Twitter accounts in a scenario where they could potentially disrupt the fairness of an election. In particular, the authors modeled the political discussion as a multilayer network for spotting the most influential users on social media as well as their communities with the application of several centrality measures.…”