JISE


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Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 489-506


Characterizing Behaviors of Sockpuppets in Online Political Discourses


HSIU-LING CHU1, YU-CHEN DAI1, WEI-BIN LEE1,3,
TING-SHEN HSIEH2 AND MING-HUNG WANG2,+
1Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science
Feng Chia University
Taichung, 407 Taiwan

2Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Chung Cheng University
Chiayi, 621 Taiwan

3Information Security Research Center
Hon Hai Research Institute, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.
Taipei, 114 Taiwan
E-mail: {purpleshah; double.dai.0129; donald880313}@gmail.com;
wei-bin.lee@foxconn.com; tonymhwang@cs.ccu.edu.tw


Recently, with the rapid development of social network services, political entities have employed social media to conduct political propaganda; they disseminate official announcements, promote candidates, and even attack the opposites. However, to influence public opinion, some of them will create sockpuppets to participate in discussions. To better understand the phenomenon, this study attempts to measure the behavioral differences between sockpuppets and normal users using network structure analysis and user behavior analysis. We observe and realize the behaviors of sockpuppets by collecting a dataset from PTT, a famous social forum in Taiwan. We propose three feature categories including authorbased, commenter-based, and network-based features. From the analysis results, we find that sockpuppets are more active and attractive than ordinary users. Moreover, we observe that sockpuppets play an essential role in information flow from the results of the network structure of user relationships.


Keywords: information manipulation, political propaganda, social media, sockpuppets, social networks

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