Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userInference of the Russian drug community from one of the largest social networks in the Russian Federation
359
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
The criminal nature of narcotics complicates the direct assessment of a drug community, while having a good understanding of the type of people drawn or currently using drugs is vital for finding effective intervening strategies. Especially for the Russian Federation this is of immediate concern given the dramatic increase it has seen in drug abuse since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Using unique data from the Russian social network LiveJournal with over 39 million registered users worldwide, we were able for the first time to identify the on-line drug community by context sensitive text mining of the users blogs using a dictionary of known drug-related official and slang terminology. By comparing the interests of the users that most actively spread information on narcotics over the network with the interests of the individuals outside the on-line drug community, we found that the average drug user in the Russian Federation is generally mostly interested in topics such as Russian rock, non-traditional medicine, UFOs, Buddhism, yoga and the occult. We identify three distinct scale-free sub-networks of users which can be uniquely classified as being either infectious, susceptible or immune.
rate research
Read More
Kompromat (the Russian word for compromising material) has been efficiently used to harass Russian political and business elites since the days of the USSR. Online crowdsourcing projects such as RuCompromat made it possible to catalog and analyze kompromat using quantitative techniques -- namely, social network analysis. In this paper, we constructed a social network of 11,000 Russian and foreign nationals affected by kompromat in Russia in 1991 -- 2020. The network has an excellent modular structure with 62 dense communities. One community contains prominent American officials, politicians, and entrepreneurs (including President Donald Trump) and appears to concern Russias controversial interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Various network centrality measures identify seventeen most central kompromat figures, with President Vladimir Putin solidly at the top. We further reveal four types of communities dominated by entrepreneurs, politicians, bankers, and law enforcement officials (siloviks), the latter disjointed from the first three.
We introduce a new paradigm that is important for community detection in the realm of network analysis. Networks contain a set of strong, dominant communities, which interfere with the detection of weak, natural community structure. When most of the members of the weak communities also belong to stronger communities, they are extremely hard to be uncovered. We call the weak communities the hidden community structure. We present a novel approach called HICODE (HIdden COmmunity DEtection) that identifies the hidden community structure as well as the dominant community structure. By weakening the strength of the dominant structure, one can uncover the hidden structure beneath. Likewise, by reducing the strength of the hidden structure, one can more accurately identify the dominant structure. In this way, HICODE tackles both tasks simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate that HICODE outperforms several state-of-the-art community detection methods in uncovering both the dominant and the hidden structure. In the Facebook university social networks, we find multiple non-redundant sets of communities that are strongly associated with residential hall, year of registration or career position of the faculties or students, while the state-of-the-art algorithms mainly locate the dominant ground truth category. In the Due to the difficulty of labeling all ground truth communities in real-world datasets, HICODE provides a promising approach to pinpoint the existing latent communities and uncover communities for which there is no ground truth. Finding this unknown structure is an extremely important community detection problem.
The role of social media in promoting media pluralism was initially viewed as wholly positive. However, some governments are allegedly manipulating social media by hiring online commentators (also known as trolls) to spread propaganda and disinformation. In particular, an alleged system of professional trolls operating both domestically and internationally exists in Russia. In 2018, Twitter released data on accounts identified as Russian trolls, starting a wave of research. However, while foreign-targeted English language operations of these trolls have received significant attention, no research has analyzed their Russian language domestic and regional-targeted activities. We address this gap by characterizing the Russian-language operations of Russian trolls. We first perform a descriptive analysis, and then focus in on the trolls operation related to the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Among other things, we find that Russian-language trolls have run 163 hashtag campaigns (where hashtag use grows abruptly within a month). The main political sentiments of such campaigns were praising Russia and Putin (29%), criticizing Ukraine (26%), and criticizing the United States and Obama (9%). Further, trolls actively reshared information with 76% of tweets being retweets or containing a URL. Additionally, we observe periodic temporal patterns of tweeting suggesting that trolls use automation tools. Further, we find that trolls information campaign on the MH17 crash was the largest in terms of tweet count. However, around 68% of tweets posted with MH17 hashtags were likely used simply for hashtag amplification. With these tweets excluded, about 49% of the tweets suggested to varying levels that Ukraine was responsible for the crash, and only 13% contained disinformation and propaganda presented as news. Interestingly, trolls promoted inconsistent alternative theories for the crash.
In many real-world scenarios, it is nearly impossible to collect explicit social network data. In such cases, whole networks must be inferred from underlying observations. Here, we formulate the problem of inferring latent social networks based on network diffusion or disease propagation data. We consider contagions propagating over the edges of an unobserved social network, where we only observe the times when nodes became infected, but not who infected them. Given such node infection times, we then identify the optimal network that best explains the observed data. We present a maximum likelihood approach based on convex programming with a l1-like penalty term that encourages sparsity. Experiments on real and synthetic data reveal that our method near-perfectly recovers the underlying network structure as well as the parameters of the contagion propagation model. Moreover, our approach scales well as it can infer optimal networks of thousands of nodes in a matter of minutes.
A longitudinal social network evolves over time through the creation and/ or deletion of links among a set of actors (e.g. individuals or organizations). Longitudinal social networks are studied by network science and social science researchers to understand networke volution, trend propagation, friendship and belief formation, diffusion of innovation, the spread of deviant behavior and more. In the current literature, there are different approaches and methods (e.g. Sampsons approach and the markov model) to study the dynamics of longitudinal social networks. These approaches and methods have mainly been utilised to explore evolutionary changes of longitudinal social networks from one state to another and to explain the underlying reasons for these changes. However, they cannot quantify the level of dynamicity of the over time network changes and the contribution of individual network members (i.e. actors) to these changes. In this study, we first develop a set of measures to quantify different aspects of the dynamicity of a longitudinal social network. We then apply these measures, in order to conduct empirical investigations, to two different longitudinal social networks. Finally, we discuss the implications of the application of these measures and possible future research directions of this study.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
