Abstract

Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns - some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of collective opinions. While most information campaigns are benign, some may be deployed for nefarious purposes, including terrorist propaganda, political astroturf, and financial market manipulation. It is therefore important to be able to detect whether a meme is being artificially promoted at the very moment it becomes wildly popular. This problem has important social implications and poses numerous technical challenges. As a first step, here we focus on discriminating between trending memes that are either organic or promoted by means of advertisement. The classification is not trivial: ads cause bursts of attention that can be easily mistaken for those of organic trends. We …

Date

March 22, 2017

Authors

Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini

Journal

EPJ Data Science

Volume

6

Issue

13