Professor Stringhini Presents Keynote at Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior Workshop
Online hate shared through social media platforms has developed into more of an epidemic than we may realize. Bullying, racist tweets, negative posts, memes and more allow people to easily band together and promote hatred. Like-minded people gather in polarized online communities, identify suitable targets, and proceed to carry out their attacks. In his efforts to understand the multitude of problems with online animosity, and to share his knowledge, Professor Gianluca Stringhini (ECE) delivered a keynote address at the 2019 Workshop on Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior, where he was also the recipient of the Best Paper Award. The workshop is the largest academic conference on web research and is held at different locations around the world.
At the workshop, Professor Stringhini’s talk highlighted the key issues surrounding social media-based hate speech in recent years. While memes are supposed to be humorous and relatable, they can also be twisted to harbor animosity. According to Stringhini, “Studying this phenomenon is hard, in part because it is not a purely technical problem, in part because this malicious activity unfolds across multiple online services, and the research community currently lacks effective tools to keep track of information that is not limited to a single platform”. His research studies the approach that groups take to orchestrate and execute coordinated hate attacks on social media, also known as “raids.” Polarized online communities, such as 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board, are particularly effective in performing this type of attack. Such attacks unfold in a coordinated sequence of hateful comments against their victim, and such synchronization becomes easily identifiable so that researchers use this recognizable pattern of synchronization to trace the raids back to their source.
Professor Stringhini is known for his achievements as a finalist for the CSAW Europe and North America Best Applied Research Award in 2017. He was also a recipient of the Google Research Award, a program which funds world-class technical research in engineering, computer science and related fields. His interests focus on data-driven methods to better understand and mitigate malicious activity online, as well as online and system security. We look forward to learning from his continued insight into online hate and his solutions for eliminating it.