RAPID: SaTC: CORE: Monitoring Social Media for Devising Improved Safeguards Online

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

Online social networking fosters interaction, collaboration, and contribution. The interactions among interconnected, communicating individuals facilitate collective intelligence, especially when people are engaged in a common goal or a shared practice. Recently, due to the tremendous increase in online attacks, there has been a substantial increase in both English and non-English social media posts in which people discuss the use of various safeguards to help protect their online security, privacy, and safety. This project is developing a framework and approach for capturing the emerging collective intelligence shared among groups of individuals who utilize social media platforms and who seek to use and follow safeguards to improve their online security, privacy, and safety. Studying these discussions will increase our understanding of people’s security and privacy needs, detect the practical challenges and limitations of available safeguards, and shed light on the future direction of online security and privacy research. This project will develop a social monitoring framework and approach for detecting, collecting, and categorizing English and non-English social media posts and conversations around emerging security vulnerabilities, privacy threats, and discussions of safeguards for protecting people's security, privacy, and safety. The project will also advance existing information retrieval and natural language processing methods, including deep learning-based classifiers, sentiment, stance, and summarization in order to extract knowledge from English and non-English posts. The data and information obtained from this study will be highly valuable to researchers trying to design effective, usable, secure, and privacy-preserving methods and tools, companies and service providers developing additional safeguard features, and Internet users seeking to protect their online security and privacy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.