Computer Science News

Shining a light on the dark corners of the web

Gianluca Stringhini, lecturer in UCL's Information Security group, is featured in a Nature feature: 'Shining a light on the dark corners of the web'. Gianluca was interviewed about the group's research around 4chan, fake news, online raids and hate speech.

As a cybercrime researcher Gianluca he has studied ransomware, online-dating scams and money laundering. In May, his team published two papers exploring how hate speech and fake news are spread around the Internet, focusing on the notorious but popular 4chan message boards.

In a conference-proceedings paper, the researchers analysed 8 million posts on 4chan’s /pol/ (‘politically incorrect’) board, and traced how its users ‘raid’ other websites by posting inflammatory comments. And in a preprint posted to the arXiv server, they traced interactions between 4chan boards and other online communities, such as Twitter and Reddit, to examine how sites share links from known fake news sites, or from what the team calls 'alternative' news sources such as RT (formerly Russia Today).

The interview can be found at http://www.nature.com/news/shining-a-light-on-the-dark-corners-of-the-web-1.22128.

 

 


Posted 12 Jun 17 09:51
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