Advancing the Science of Social Cyber-Security Around Information Diffusion and Authenticity

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Social cybersecurity is an emerging scientific area aimed at understanding and forecasting changes in human behavior, social, and economic outcomes that might arise from threats enabled by online communication platforms. These threats range from increasingly realistic deceptive messages, such as spear-phishing or simulated but realistic videos, to manipulation of systems for creating and distributing content in social networks. This project will conduct a two-day workshop that brings together social and computer scientists interested in information dissemination with the goal of going beyond current work that focuses on labeling the veracity of particular information or actors, or encouraging information consumers to consider veracity. Instead, the workshop will take a broader theoretical lens that (a) analyzes how current models of information diffusion, rumor, social influence, communication, and so on need to adapt to novel and rapidly changing socio-technical environments and (b) focuses on the impact of these systems, identifying what is needed to characterize, measure, and affect the impact of information with different, and not necessarily consensus, credibility evaluations on the diverse consumers of that information, a problem of great import in domains ranging from news to health to crisis response.The workshop organizers will invite participants from a large variety of institutions, representing a broad range of both intellectual backgrounds and participant demographics, to increase the diversity of perspectives on the problem. After an opening plenary session where participants can pose key challenges, questions, and gaps, the main part of the workshop will be devoted to breakout groups organized around those challenges; a closing plenary session will develop plans for moving forward. These sessions will be structured to produce three main outcomes. The first is a set of challenge descriptions that define forward-looking problems in the space of information diffusion and manipulation, characterize what different scientific disciplines can provide toward them, and identify the next steps needed to address these challenges. The second is a plan for developing a larger conference in the area of social cybersecurity for information diffusion that brings together researchers from different backgrounds and communities around the challenges identified. The third is a longer term road map describing a scientific path toward addressing these challenges, with the goal of illuminating how stakeholder communities can coordinate to make progress toward them.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.