Reliability-Disguised Attacks on Social Network to Accelerate Fake News Dissemination

• Published in: 2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C) pp. 841 - 848
• Main Authors: Yoshikawa, Kento, Awa, Takumi, Kusano, Risa, Ichino, Masatsugu, Yoshiura, Hiroshi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Conferences; fake news; Focusing; opinion dissemination; Psychology; Reliability; reliability disguising; social network; Social networking (online); Software quality; Software reliability
• DOI: 10.1109/QRS-C55045.2021.00127

With the increasing popularity of social media, fake news has become a serious problem. Typical countermeasures such as fake news detection and fact-checking support are insufficient because widespread communication on social media amplifies the psychological tendency for people to ignore facts that contradict their beliefs. Developing effective countermeasures requires clarifying the properties of fake news in terms of communication. We present three models explaining the dissemination of opinions about fake news in the presence of malicious information sources that spread fake news by disguising themselves as reliable. Experimental results on a representative social network revealed that this attack is always effective independent of the models. We also revealed that this attack tends to not only accelerate the spread of misinformation beneficial to the attacker but also suppress the spread of correct information detrimental to the attacker.