Date and time: 11:00, 22.03.2021
Format: Online, Zoom
Description of the Presentation:
Nowadays, disinformation and propaganda campaigns are frequently carried out on social media with the aim to mislead and to manipulate crowds. In order to be successful, each campaign must spread to and "infect" a large number of users. This often mandates large coordinated efforts, as well as the use of bot armies, for the campaign to obtain significant outreach, to exert influence, and to have an impact. In this talk, we will provide a gentle overview of the state-of-the-art in the computational detection of propaganda campaigns, social bots and – more generally – coordinated inauthentic behavior. We will show the advantage of focusing on coordination and group behaviors, rather than focusing on the behavior and characteristics of individual social network accounts, as done in previous years. We will also briefly survey the most promising techniques for detecting propaganda and social bots and for studying online coordination, highlighting and discussing the tell-tale signs of deception and manipulation.
About the Presenter:
Stefano Cresci is a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). His scientific interests broadly lay at the intersection of Data Science and Web Science, with a particular focus on the fight against disinformation, fake content (fake news) and fake online profiles (social bots and trolls). His research also encompasses the "social sensing" paradigm that Stefano investigates with the goal of exploiting the multitude of data shared online for improving our response to emergency situations such as natural and man-made disasters.
Stefano published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles on these topics, as well as a Springer book on Information Warfare. He is consistently involved in national and European research projects, he gives keynotes at international conferences and his results attract significant media coverage, both in Italy and abroad. Based on his scientific results, Stefano won a SAGE Grant, the IEEE Computer Society Italy Section Chapter 2018 PhD Thesis Award, the 2019 IEEE Next-Generation Data Scientist Award and the prestigious 2020 ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award.
If you want to participate in the event, please get in touch with Anna Ryzhova.