Dishonestly posting online comments, tweets or reviews might not be illegal but is certainly ethically-questionable. Now, researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio describe a new method for detecting online dishonesty, or “astroturfing”.
Astroturfing has existed since the dawn of social media. It can be used for any number of reason: businesses can use it to manipulate online shoppers and social media users or to sabotage competing companies; it can be used to espouse opinions on certain subjects by creating an illusion of a consensus; even politicians can use it to encourage support.
The new method is a statistical one that analyzes multiple writing samples. With it, the researchers were able to find that it’s difficult for authors to completely hide their writing style, which means that they often slip up while pretending to be someone else. So, based on context, word choice, and punctuation, this method was able to detect whether one or multiple individuals were responsible for the samples.
Now that the researchers have the capability to detect astroturfing, further applications are possible. “In addition to raising public awareness of the problem, we hope to develop tools to detect astroturfers so that social media users can make informed choices and resist online social manipulation and propaganda,” says Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, who led the research.
Source:
University of Texas at San Antonio(https://www.utsa.edu/today/2016/10/astroturfing.html)
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