EAGER: Understanding the Scope and Impact of Internet Information Manipulation

最近，我们看到了网络安全面临的新挑战，在这些挑战中，对手寻求的不是简单地拒绝服务、窃取数据或利用资源，而是利用网络扭曲信息以影响观点、思想或行动。这种互联网信息操纵具有挑战性，因为互联网的规模使其更容易影响大量用户，互联网上的匿名性使归因和身份难以确定，信息流的控制是分布式的和高度自动化的，允许轻松修改个性化和过滤算法。本研究计划旨在研究网际网路上的资讯操纵。具体来说，它试图提供操纵的证据，并证明问题的严重性。该项目包括三个部分：(1)构建互联网信息操纵案例的文献语料库；(2)识别互联网信息流中的各种参与者及其相互关系；(3)实证分析这些参与者之间信息流的范围。更广泛地说，这项工作将提供数据，为技术和方法提供信息，从而增强真正跨学科的一系列领域，从社会和政治科学到网络和分布式系统、安全、信息检索和数据挖掘。

Recently we have seen the emergence new challenges to cyber security in which adversaries seek, not to simply to deny service, steal data, or utilize resources, but rather to use the network to distort information to influence opinion, thought, or action. Such Internet information manipulation is challenging in that the scale of the Internet makes it easier to influence large numbers of users, that the anonymity on the Internet makes attribution and identity hard, and that the control of information flow is distributed and highly automated allowing for easy modification of personalization and filtering algorithms.This research project proposes to study information manipulation on the Internet. Specifically, it seeks to provide evidence of manipulation and demonstrate the serious nature of the problem. The project has three parts: (1) Constructing a corpus of documented cases of Internet information manipulation, (2) An identification of various players in Internet information flow and their relationships to each other, and (3) An empirical analysis of the scope of the information flow between these players. More broadly, the work will provide data to inform techniques, and methods that with enhance a truly interdisciplinary set of fields, from the social and political sciences, to networking and distributed systems, security, information retrieval, and data mining.