Title :
Securing Social Media via Network Structure
Abstract:
Due to its democratized nature, online social media (OSM) attracts millions of users to publish and share their content with friends as well as a wider audience at little cost. Such a vast user base and a wealth of content, however, presents its own challenges. First, the amount of user-generated content being uploaded in their repositories makes it non-trivial for users to find relevant content. Second, the ease of creating an account and participating in OSM enables malicious users to spread and promote spam content while degrading the experience for normal users. Third, growing privacy concerns in OSM motivate users to move toward decentralized social networks which are still in a nascent stage.
In our work, we propose a network structure approach to address these challenges in OSM. We build scalable and effective graph-based algorithms that recommend content personalized to each user. To tackle adversarial environments, we leverage the social network graph as well as negative feedback from normal users to limit the capability of knowledgeable attackers in multiple scenarios. Further, we highlight some of the practical limitations in existing efforts to build decentralized social networks, and outline desiderata for such distributed systems to work well in the wild.