Publications related to Fake news

It’s All Relative: Learning Interpretable Models for Scoring Subjective Bias in Documents from Pairwise Comparisons

Matthias Grossglauser, Aswin Suresh, Chi Hsuan Wu

We propose an interpretable model to score the subjective bias present in documents, based only on their textual content. Our model is trained on pairs of revisions of the same Wikipedia article, where one version is more biased than the other. Although pr ...

2024

Efficient Temporally-Aware DeepFake Detection using H.264 Motion Vectors

Sabine Süsstrunk, Yufan Ren, Peter Arpad Grönquist, Alessio Verardo, Qingyi He

Video DeepFakes are fake media created with Deep Learning (DL) that manipulate a person’s expression or identity. Most current DeepFake detection methods analyze each frame independently, ignoring inconsistencies and unnatural movements between frames. Som ...

2024

Assessment framework for deepfake detection in real-world situations

Touradj Ebrahimi, Yuhang Lu

Detecting digital face manipulation in images and video has attracted extensive attention due to the potential risk to public trust. To counteract the malicious usage of such techniques, deep learning-based deepfake detection methods have been employed and ...

2024

United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

Robert West, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous t ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Improving Deepfake Detectors against Real-world Perturbations with Amplitude-Phase Switch Augmentation

Touradj Ebrahimi, Yuhang Lu, Ruizhi Luo

In recent years, the remarkable progress in facial manipulation techniques has raised social concerns due to their potential malicious usage and has received considerable attention from both industry and academia. While current deep learning-based face for ...

2023

How Did Europe's Press Cover Covid-19 Vaccination News? A Five-Country Analysis

Daniel Gatica-Perez

Understanding how high-quality newspapers present and discuss major news plays a role towards tackling disinformation, as it contributes to the characterization of the full ecosystem in which information circulates. In this paper, we present an analysis of ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

Combating Online Scientific Misinformation

Panagiotis Smeros

The drastic shift towards digital communication in our mediasphere has caused a profound change in the production and consumption of information, which in turn has substantial implications on the social and political landscape. Misinformation, as a side ef ...

EPFL2022

Synthetic Disinformation Attacks on Automated Fact Verification Systems

Antoine Bosselut

Automated fact-checking is a needed technology to curtail the spread of online misinformation. One current framework for such solutions proposes to verify claims by retrieving supporting or refuting evidence from related textual sources. However, the reali ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2022

The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation

Tugrulcan Elmas

In recent years we have seen a marked increase in disinformation including as part of a strategy of so-called hybrid warfare. Adversaries not only directly spread misleading content but manipulate social media by employing sophisticated techniques that exp ...

EPFL2022

Quote Erat Demonstrandum: AWeb Interface for Exploring the Quotebank Corpus

Robert West, Akhil Arora, Andreas Oliver Spitz, Huan-Cheng Chang, Vuk Vukovic

The use of attributed quotes is the most direct and least filtered pathway of information propagation in news. Consequently, quotes play a central role in the conception, reception, and analysis of news stories. Since quotes provide a more direct window in ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

A novel assessment framework for learning-based deepfake detectors in realistic conditions

Touradj Ebrahimi, Yuhang Lu

Detecting manipulations in facial images and video has become an increasingly popular topic in media forensics community. At the same time, deep convolutional neural networks have achieved exceptional results on deepfake detection tasks. Despite the remark ...

2022

Is Your Time Well Spent Online?: Focusing on Quality Experiences Through a User-Centered Recommendation Algorithm and Simulation Model

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Rania Islambouli

Spending an uncontrolled quantity and quality of time on digital news and social media platforms can negatively influence mental health and decrease cognitive abilities. In this paper, we propose a sequential news recommendation system employing deep reinf ...

IEEE2022

The Universal Gossip Fighter

Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Rafaël Benjamin Pinot

The notion of adversary is a staple of distributed computing. An adversary typically models “hostile” assumptions about the underlying distributed environment, e.g., a network that can drop messages, an operating system that can delay processes or an attac ...

IEEE2022

Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends

Karl Aberer, Tugrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Jean Overdorf, Ahmed Furkan Ozkalay

We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and inauthentic activity ...

IEEE2021

Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Bryan Alexander Ford

While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...

University of Chicago Press2021

SciClops: Detecting and Contextualizing Scientific Claims for Assisting Manual Fact-Checking

Karl Aberer, Panagiotis Smeros, Carlos Castillo

This paper describes SciClops, a method to help combat online scientific misinformation. Although automated fact-checking methods have gained significant attention recently, they require pre-existing ground-truth evidence, which, in the scientific context, ...

ACM2021

On Representation Learning for Scientific News Articles Using Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs

Karl Aberer, Angeliki Romanou, Panagiotis Smeros

In the era of misinformation and information inflation, the credibility assessment of the produced news is of the essence. However, fact-checking can be challenging considering the limited references presented in the news. This challenge can be transcended ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Exploration of Media Blockchain Technologies for JPEG Privacy and Security

Touradj Ebrahimi

The need for efficient, widespread and reliable security and user privacy technologies is important more so than ever before. This is in particular crucial for workflows involving image data. Images can be easily edited to give a false impression of realit ...

SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING2021

Risk governance and the rise of deepfakes

Touradj Ebrahimi

Deepfakes first came to prominence less than five years ago. Since then, they have surged in quantity and quality, becoming both a source of viral entertainment and of concern about the dark side of digital life. In this article, we provide a risk governan ...

International Risk Governance Center2021

Disinformation from the Inside: Combining Machine Learning and Journalism to Investigate Sockpuppet Campaigns

Rebekah Jean Overdorf

This paper brings together machine learning and investigative journalism to examine sockpuppets accounts, a historical breed of fake accounts that are non-automated and human-controlled. Due to their flexible and human-centered nature, sockpuppets pose a c ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020