Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army

MIT Technology Review

An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites.

The Internet Water Army is a group of individuals in China who are paid to inundate the Internet with comments, gossip, or other content to build up or demolish the consumer ranking of products and services.

University of Victoria researcher Cheng Chen and colleagues went undercover as posters to expose the group’s modus operandi. The posters are typically tasked with registering on a Web site and then producing content in the form of posts, articles, links to sites and videos, etc., which is frequently pre-prepared. 

Once having determined the system’s workings, the researchers analyzed the pattern of posts appearing on several major Chinese sites. They then sifted through the posts manually, identifying those thought to be from paid posters, and then seeking behavioral patterns that can distinguish them from genuine users.

According to their analysis, paid posters post more new comments than replies to other comments, they post more often, and they move on from a discussion faster than legitimate users. The paid posters also take shortcuts, frequently cutting and pasting the same content. The researchers created software to look for these patterns, and it can identify paid posters with 88 percent accuracy.  Report

DCL: There’s a lot of event pattern discovery and detection going on in this work. It was done manually. I think it could be partially automated using event processing engines. What do you think?