RAPID: Investigating Social Influence and Mitigating Disinformation Campaigns in Non-English Social Media

非英语的Twitter和其他社交媒体一直是非西方国家的活动人士在公开抗议期间发表意见和交流信息的公共空间。然而，不同行为者的网络攻击被用来歪曲新闻，恶意分散观众的注意力，干扰集体行动，滋生情感两极分化和群体仇恨。该项目团队将研究网络世界中的网络攻击和通信如何与线下抗议、暴力和国家行动相关联。该项目团队正在收集大量具有代表性的非英语社交媒体语料库。该团队正在开发工具来识别错误信息及其来源，以便为依赖社交媒体接收新闻的日常用户提供一个更安全、更值得信赖的网络空间。鉴于收集语料库的科学意义，以及该领域潜在的安全问题，该项目团队正在为有兴趣研究该语料库的研究人员制定一项数据共享协议，同时为用户提供一定程度的安全和匿名。部分数据正在为机器人、错误信息和不同类型的修辞进行注释。这些数据将被用来设计和优化该领域的机器人和巨魔检测模型，这些模型将被整合到浏览器插件中，以帮助用户检测有问题的信息和账户。这个跨学科的项目将促进我们对在线交流和线下暴力在一个研究不足的文化背景下所扮演的角色的基本理解，增加关于西方民主以外的在线行为的新兴工作线。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Non-English Twitter and other social media have served as public spaces for activists in non-Western countries to express opinions and exchange information during public protests. However, cyber-attacks by different actors have been used to distort the news, malevolently distract audiences, interrupt collective action, and foster affective polarization and outgroup hate. The project team will be studying how cyber-attacks and communication in this online world are correlated with offline protests, violence, and state action. The project team is collecting a large representative corpus of Non-English social media. The team is building tools to identify misinformation and its sources in order to provide a more secure and trustworthy cyberspace to everyday users who rely on social media for receiving news.Given the scientific significance of the corpus being collected, along with the potential security concerns of this domain, the project team is working on a data sharing agreement for researchers interested in studying this corpus while providing a level of security and anonymity to users. Part of the data is being annotated for bots, misinformation, and different types of rhetoric. The data will be used to design and optimize models of bot and troll detection for this domain that will be incorporated in browser plug-ins to help users detect problematic information and accounts. The interdisciplinary project will advance our basic understanding of the role of online communication and offline violence in an understudied cultural setting, adding to the emerging line of work on online behaviors outside Western democracies.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.