Collaborative Research: SaTC: TTP: Medium: iDRAMA.cloud: A Platform for Measuring and Understanding Information Manipulation

社交媒体对我们的社会已经变得至关重要，尤其是在信息迅速广泛传播的时候。然而，不良行为者利用社交媒体，例如通过信息操纵。虽然已经为解决这个问题做出了努力，但仍存在各种各样的挑战，使研究和打击信息操纵在实践中变得困难。该项目旨在通过将一组算法、软件框架和系统设计从研究实验室转移到活跃的从业者手中来解决这些挑战，以帮助识别和减轻信息操纵（错误信息和虚假信息）。该项目的新颖之处在于设计和开发了具有生产能力的开源软件套件，可以快速收集、管理和分析社交媒体数据。该项目更广泛的意义和重要性主要与确保信息生态系统的稳定性有关。在该项目下创建的生产就绪软件还可以帮助教育未来的从业者在系统、机器学习和数据科学领域的基本软件开发技能。在这个建议中，项目团队的目标是将使前沿研究成为可能的工具转化为实践。项目团队将根据在各种大型社交媒体数据收集系统上的工作经验，开发一个功能齐全的爬虫构建工具包。接下来，项目团队将开发一个数据表征和增强工具包，整合来自信息操纵研究的最先进技术。最后，项目团队将开发一组数据访问和共享api，包括一个联邦子系统，从业者可以围绕它构建新技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Social media has become crucial to our society, especially when it comes to the rapid and broad dissemination of information. However, bad actors have exploited social media, for example via information manipulation. While there have been efforts made to address the problem, there are a variety of challenges that make it difficult to study and combat information manipulation in practice. This project aims to address these challenges by transitioning a set of algorithms, software frameworks, and system designs out of the research lab into the hands of active practitioners to help identify and mitigate information manipulation (misinformation and dis-information). This project’s novelties are the design and development of production capable, open-source software suite to enable the rapid collection, management, and analysis of social media data. The project’s broader significance and importance is primarily related to ensuring the stability of the information ecosystem. The production ready software created under the project can also help educate future practitioners about fundamental software development skills in the areas of systems, machine learning, and data science.In this proposal, the project team aims to transition the tooling that has enabled cutting edge research into practice. The project team will develop a full featured crawler construction toolkit built from experiences working on a variety of large-scale social media data collection systems. Next, the project team will develop a data characterization and augmentation toolkit, integrating state-of-the-art techniques from information manipulation research. Finally, the project team will develop a set of data access and sharing APIs, including a federation subsystem, that practitioners can build new technologies around.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.