{"id":1099,"date":"2021-04-01T15:36:05","date_gmt":"2021-04-01T13:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/?post_type=news&p=1099"},"modified":"2021-04-14T15:25:45","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T13:25:45","slug":"petrocchi-social-networks-fake-news-bot","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/news\/petrocchi-social-networks-fake-news-bot\/","title":{"rendered":"Be careful what you read on social networks: between fake profiles and fake content, getting (well) informed is not easy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We hear it said over and over again: look out, not everything circulating on the Internet is true. We face it when election time comes round, when we try to get an idea of who to vote for, when we read news that seems unbelievable or simply when we tend to place too much trust in a post read on Facebook. The phenomenon is so widespread that entire lines of research<\/strong> have been created in the field of the Internet dedicated to studying and identifying all that is false on the net<\/strong>. Marinella Petrocchi<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Researcher at the Trust, Security and Privacy research unit<\/strong> of the IIT-CNR, works in that field.

Persons or robots?<\/strong>

\u201cI have studied social bots for a long time, in collaboration with Maurizio Tesconi and Stefano Cresci\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(also researchers at IIT-CNR, recently seen on our live \u201cIl mondo dei bot\u201d)\u201d. Social bots are algorithms programmed to perform a certain task and hide behind a person\u2019s social profile. They are to all intents and purposes robots, even if they don\u2019t have circuits and gears, and they can blend in very well\u00a0on social networks like Twitter<\/a>. \u201cThey are often programmed for harmless and indeed useful purposes, like the automatic dissemination of news, but there is also a real market for fake accounts, with credible profiles and posing as real people<\/em>\u201d, she explains. Whoever wants to expand their following, from celebrities to politicians, and including the big brands, is interested in buying these profiles.

Petrocchi and colleagues have worked on detection, developing techniques to automatically identify fake profiles. They were among the first in the world to deal with the subject, starting from the intuition of studying profiles in groups rather than individually.\u00a0\u201cBots often act in a coordinated manner\u00a0often act in a coordinated manner<\/a>, spreading misleading messages\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(the bot squads phenomenon, wich Petrocchi and her colleagues have studied with the 2020 paper \u201cThe role of bot squads in the political propaganda on Twitter<\/a><\/em>). \u201cIt has been well proven that they have played a role in the main electoral campaigns, including those of Trump and Macron\u201d.<\/em>

Social manipulation<\/strong>

On the net, it\u2019s not just the people that are fake, but the news too.\u00a0\u201cFor a couple of years now I have been dealing with disinformation<\/strong> and misinformation<\/strong>, terms which, with different nuances, describe the proliferation of false content on social media\u201d<\/em>. The first term is used to indicate an untruthful content disseminated with the intention of contaminating the public debate, while the second does not presuppose malicious purposes, only the lack of awareness of whoever is spreading the content.

\"\"Petrocchi has an ongoing project in collaboration with the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca,\u00a0Toffee<\/a>, in which computer scientists, statistical physicists and mathematicians join forces to monitor the activity of bots on the Internet. In particular, the researchers look for anomalies in the diffusion of news.\u00a0\u201cThese are strategies put in place by real people, who use groups of bots to amplify the diffusion of scarcely reputable news. For example, in a dataset of tweets on migrants in Italian, it emerged that some communities of users, mostly belonging to the conservative political area, managed to get their arguments across thanks to teams of bots\u201d.<\/em>

The final goal of the project is the creation of a platform that can guide those who obtain information on the net, reporting the presence of bots and indicating the most reliable sources on the social networks.

Virtual prisons<\/strong>

Finally, a topic very dear to Petrocchi concerns the opportunities offered by social networks.\u00a0\u201cI have often wondered if the Internet is a resource or a prison\u201d, she says. I\u2019m thinking in particular of the high risk of those who often use social networks to get information and make new friends, finding themselves inside a bubble. It\u2019s something we experience everyday as common users. Algorithms tend to show results that are related to your interests, what you like, and what you would like to read. In recent years we have studied the phenomenon and how to counter it in the\u00a0Mib<\/a>\u00a0project \u201d.<\/em>

Marinella Petrocchi was interviewed a few weeks ago by the RaiPlay program\u00a0ConverseRai<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1107,"template":"","categories":[],"tags":[54,55,46],"class_list":["post-1099","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-bot-2","tag-disinformation","tag-social-networks-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/1099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iit.cnr.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}