Communications of the ACM
Tricking Fake News Detectors With Malicious User Comments
Fake news detectors are used on many online and social media communities to flag misleading posts, based primarily on the story's headline and content.
Credit: George J. McLittle/Adobe
Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) have demonstrated how fake news detectors, like those used by Twitter and Facebook, can be manipulated through user comments.
The researchers found that adversaries are able to use random accounts on social media to post malicious comments to flag real stories as fake news or promote fake stories as real news.
This involves attacking the detector itself, rather than the story's content or source.
The framework developed by the researchers to generate, optimize, and add malicious comments to articles, successfully tricked five of the leading neural network-based fake news detectors more than 93% of the time.
Penn State's Thai Le said the research "highlights the importance of having robust fake news detection models that can defend against adversarial attacks."
From Penn State News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2020 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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