Research: Paid Posters Poison the Internet

In China, they're known as the Internet Urine Army: legions of people paid to flood online hangouts with postings and comments (in the first place for marketing purposes). And according to pedantic researchers, they're debasing information quality on the Web.

In a research report released this week, researchers Cheng Chen, Kui Shanghai dialect, Venkatesh, Srinivasan, and Xudong Zhang explain that paid posters are leased by public relations and merchandising firms to post content connected Websites–usually some a multiethnic event, merchandise, Beaver State company.

For marketers, remunerated posters are a way to control word-of-mouth publicity nearly whatever they're trying to deal.

"If a ship's company hires sufficiency online users, IT would be able to make thermal and trending topics designed to gain popularity," the researchers write. "Furthermore, the articles or comments from a group of postpaid posters are besides likely to capture the attention of common users and influence their decision."

That which is good for marketers, however, isn't always good for consumers.

"Though and interesting strategy in business merchandising, paid posters may create a profound negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually non trustworthy," the newspaper states.

The practice can poison the attitudes of network surfers, especially when the deuce armies clash in net. "When two competitive companies hire profitable posters to post fake news or negative comments about each other, average online users may feel overwhelmed and find it herculean to put any trust in the information they acquire from the Internet."

To illustrate this, the researchers cited an instance in which a seemingly inane message was posted to a World of Warcraft meeting place in China.

"Junpeng Jia, your mother asked you to go back home plate for dinner!" The message said.

In two days, the message had garnered over 300,000 replies and heptad one thousand thousand clicks. It was later revealed that a PR firm was behind the surge in traffic–it longed-for to maintain interest in the site while it was downbound for arrangement maintenance, so IT hired 800 posters who utilized 20,000 identities to create the illusion of purposeful activity happening there.

Although the researchers focused their attention on stipendiary posters in China, these techniques are victimised every last over the world. The U.S. military, for instance, has been running on software to automatise the process of creating "sockpuppet" armies to invade social networks and online forums and gather information on terrorists and terrorist organizations. The researchers also showed how "socialbots" made ahead of phoney "friends" could be exploited for mischief along Facebook.

Through their research, the scientists identified several ways to identify potential paid posters on a forum. Paid posters add new comments to a meeting place more often than typical members, for example. This is because they work under tiddley time constraints and don't have meter to interpret other member's comments.

For the same reasonableness, the plac between comment postings is shorter, too. And they get into't use an I.D. very long, either. Their "mission" time is usually short. When their mission is done, they discard their I.D. and never use information technology again.

Detective work infiltration of a internet site by prepaid posters with automated systems that use semantic analysis can be effective, the researchers noted.

"The reason why the semantic analysis improves performance is that online paid posters a great deal try to post many comments with extraordinary modest edits along each post, leading to similar sentences," they explained. "This helps the prepaid posters Emily Price Post many comments and complete their assignments quickly, but too helps our classifier to detect them."

Succeed freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478532/research_paid_posters_poison_the_internet.html

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