EAGER: Understanding the Scope and Impact of Internet Information Manipulation

最近，我们看到网络安全面临新的挑战，对手寻求的不只是拒绝服务、窃取数据或利用资源，而是利用网络扭曲信息以影响意见、思想或行动。这样的互联网信息操纵具有挑战性，因为互联网的规模使得影响大量用户变得更容易，互联网上的匿名性使得归属和身份识别变得困难，信息流的控制是分布式的并且高度自动化，允许容易地修改个性化和过滤算法。具体地说，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)建立一个记录在案的互联网信息操纵案例语料库；(2)识别互联网信息流中的各个参与者及其相互关系；(3)对这些参与者之间的信息流范围进行实证分析。更广泛地说，这项工作将为信息技术和方法提供数据，以加强从社会科学和政治学到网络和分布式系统、安全、信息检索和数据挖掘等一系列真正跨学科的领域。

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.