Modern technologies like social media are making it easier than ever for enemies of the United States to emotionally manipulate U.S. citizens.
U.S. officials warn that foreign adversaries are trying to produce tremendous amounts of false, misleading information online to sway public opinion in the U.S. Just this July, the Department of Justice announced it had disrupted a Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign that used nearly one thousand fake social media accounts in an attempt to spread disinformation.
While AI is commonly used on offense in disinformation wars to generate large amounts of content, AI is now playing an important role in defense, too.
Mark Finlayson, a professor at FIU's College of Engineering and Computing, is an expert in training AI to understand stories. He has spent more than two decades studying the subject.
Storytelling is important to spreading disinformation.
"A heartfelt narrative or a personal anecdote is often more compelling to an audience than the facts," says Finlayson. "Stories are particularly effective in overcoming resistance to an idea."
For example, a climate activist may be more successful in convincing an audience about plastic pollution by sharing a personal story of a rescued sea turtle with a straw lodged in its nose, rather than only citing statistics, Finlayson says. The story makes the problem relatable.
"We are exploring the different ways stories are used to drive an argument," he explains. "It's a challenging problem, as stories in social media posts can be as brief as a single sentence, and sometimes, these posts may only allude to well-known stories without explicitly retelling them."
Finlayson's team is also exploring how AI can analyze usernames or handles in a social media profile. Azwad Islam, a Ph.D. student and co-author on a recent paper published with Finlayson, explains that usernames often contain significant clues about a user's identity and intentions.
The paper was published in the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, a conference in artificial intelligence.
"Handles reveal much about users and how they want to be perceived," Islam explains. "For example, a person claiming to be a New York journalist might choose the handle, '@AlexBurnsNYT' rather than '@NewYorkBoy," because it sounds more credible. Both handles, however, suggest the user is a male with an affiliation to New York."
The FIU team demonstrated a tool that can analyze a user handle, reliably revealing a person's claimed name, gender, location and even personality (if that information is hinted at in the handle).
Although a user handle alone can't confirm whether an account is fake, it can be crucial in analyzing an account's overall authenticity—especially as AI's ability to understand stories evolves.
"By interpreting handles as part of the larger narrative an account presents, we believe usernames could become a critical tool in identifying sources of disinformation," Islam says.
More: https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-ai-foreign-online.html
