Over the past 20 years or so, the world has seen an explosion of data. While in the past, controlled experiments, surveys, or compilation of high-level statistics allowed us to gain insights into the problems we explored, the Web has brought about a host of new challenges for researchers hoping to gain an understanding of modern socio-technical behavior. First, even discovering appropriate data sources is not a straightforward task. Next, although the Web enables us to collect highly detailed digital information, there are issues of availability and ephemerality: simply put, researchers have no control over what data a 3rd party platform collects and exposes, and more specifically, no control over how long that data will remain available. Third, the massive scale and multiple data formats require creative analysis execution. Finally, modern socio-technical problems, while related to typical social problems, are fundamentally different and, in addition to posing a research challenge, can also disrupt researchers' personal lives.
In this talk, I will discuss how our work has overcome the above challenges. Using concrete examples from our research, I will delve into some of the unique datasets and analyses we have performed, focusing on emerging issues like hate speech, coordinated harassment campaigns, and deplatforming, as well as modeling the influence that Web communities have on the spread of disinformation, weaponized memes, etc. Finally, I will discuss how we can design proactive systems to anticipate and predict online abuse and, if time permits, how the "fringe" information ecosystem exposes researchers to attacks by the very actors they study.
Emiliano De Cristofaro is Professor of Security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies at University College London (UCL). He received a PhD in 2011 from the University of California, Irvine, advised by Gene Tsudik. Before joining UCL in 2013, Emiliano was Research Scientist at Xerox PARC. His research background includes privacy-oriented (applied) cryptography and systems security; currently, he focuses on privacy in machine learning and cybersafety. Emiliano has co-chaired the PETS Symposium and the security/privacy tracks at WWW and ACM CCS. With his co-authors, he received distinguished paper/honorable mention awards from ACM CCS, NDSS, ACM IMC, and ACM CSCW. Ostensibly, he only refers to himself in the third person when writing seminar bios.