Effect of Online Social Networking on Emotional Status and Its Interaction with Offline Reality during the Early Stage of the COVID-19 Pandemic in China

Background:During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in China,social interactions shifted to online spaces due to lockdowns and social distancing measures.As a result,the impact of online social networking on users’emotional status has become stronger than ever.This study examines the association between online social networking and Internet users’emotional status and how offline reality affects this relationship.Methods:The study utilizes cross-sectional online survey data(n=3004)and Baidu Migration big data from the first 3 months of the pandemic.Two dimensions of online networking are measured:social support and information sources.Results:First,individuals’online social support(β=0.16,p<0.05)and information sources(β=0.08,p<0.01)are both positively associated to their emotional status during the epidemic.Second,these positive associations are moderated by social status and provincial pandemic control interventions.With regards to the moderation effect of social status,the constructive impact of information sources on emotional well-being is more pronounced among individuals from vulnerable groups compared to those who are not.With regard to the moderation effect of provincial interventions,online social support has the potential to alleviate the adverse repercussions of high rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases and strict lockdown measures while simultaneously augmenting the favorable effects of recovery.Conclusion:The various dimensions of social networking exert distinct effects on emotional status through diverse mechanisms,all of which must be taken into account when designing and adapting pandemic-control interventions.

Malicious Activities Prediction Over Online Social Networking Using Ensemble Model

With the vast advancements in Information Technology,the emergence of Online Social Networking(OSN)has also hit its peak and captured the atten-tion of the young generation people.The clone intends to replicate the users and inject massive malicious activities that pose a crucial security threat to the original user.However,the attackers also target this height of OSN utilization,explicitly creating the clones of the user’s account.Various clone detection mechanisms are designed based on social-network activities.For instance,monitoring the occur-rence of clone edges is done to restrict the generation of clone activities.However,this assumption is unsuitable for a real-time environment and works optimally during the simulation process.This research concentrates on modeling and effi-cient clone prediction and avoidance methods to help the social network activists and the victims enhance the clone prediction accuracy.This model does not rely on assumptions.Here,an ensemble Adaptive Random Subspace is used for clas-sifying the clone victims with k-Nearest Neighbour(k-NN)as a base classifier.The weighted clone nodes are analysed using the weighted graph theory concept based on the classified results.When the weighted node’s threshold value is high-er,the trust establishment is terminated,and the clones are ranked and sorted in the higher place for termination.Thus,the victims are alert to the clone propaga-tion over the online social networking end,and the validation is done using the MATLAB 2020a simulation environment.The model shows a better trade-off than existing approaches like Random Forest(RF),Naïve Bayes(NB),and the standard graph model.Various performance metrics like True Positive Rate(TPR),False Alarm Rate(FAR),Recall,Precision,F-measure,and ROC and run time analysis are evaluated to show the significance of the model.

Identification of Influential Users in Online Social Network: A Brief Overview

Information networks where users join a network, publish their own content, and create links to other users are called Online Social Networks (OSNs). Nowadays, OSNs have become one of the major platforms to promote both new and viral applications as well as disseminate information. Social network analysis is the study of these information networks that leads to uncovering patterns of interaction among the entities. In this regard, finding influential users in OSNs is very important as they play a key role in the success above phenomena. Various approaches exist to detect influential users in OSNs, starting from simply counting the immediate neighbors to more complex machine-learning and message-passing techniques. In this paper, we review the recent existing research works that focused on identifying influential users in OSNs.

A Personalized Search Model Using Online Social Network Data Based on a Holonic Multiagent System

Personalized search utilizes user preferences to optimize search results,and most existing studies obtain user preferences by analyzing user behaviors in search engines that provide click-through data.However,the behavioral data are noisy because users often clicked some irrelevant documents to find their required information,and the new user cold start issue represents a serious problem,greatly reducing the performance of personalized search.This paper attempts to utilize online social network data to obtain user preferences that can be used to personalize search results,mine the knowledge of user interests,user influence and user relationships from online social networks,and use this knowledge to optimize the results returned by search engines.The proposed model is based on a holonic multiagent system that improves the adaptability and scalability of the model.The experimental results show that utilizing online social network data to implement personalized search is feasible and that online social network data are significant for personalized search.

ED-SWE:Event detection based on scoring and word embedding in online social networks for the internet of people

Online social media networks are gaining attention worldwide,with an increasing number of people relying on them to connect,communicate and share their daily pertinent event-related information.Event detection is now increasingly leveraging online social networks for highlighting events happening around the world via the Internet of People.In this paper,a novel Event Detection model based on Scoring and Word Embedding(ED-SWE)is proposed for discovering key events from a large volume of data streams of tweets and for generating an event summary using keywords and top-k tweets.The proposed ED-SWE model can distill high-quality tweets,reduce the negative impact of the advent of spam,and identify latent events in the data streams automatically.Moreover,a word embedding algorithm is used to learn a real-valued vector representation for a predefined fixed-sized vocabulary from a corpus of Twitter data.In order to further improve the performance of the Expectation-Maximization(EM)iteration algorithm,a novel initialization method based on the authority values of the tweets is also proposed in this paper to detect live events efficiently and precisely.Finally,a novel automatic identification method based on the cosine measure is used to automatically evaluate whether a given topic can form a live event.Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the ED-SWE model exhibits better efficiency and accuracy than several state-of-art event detection models.

Towards understanding bogus traffic service in online social networks

Critical functionality and huge infuence of the hot trend/topic page(HTP)in microblogging sites have driven the creation of a new kind of underground service called the bogus traffic service(BTS).BTS provides a kind of illegal service which hijacks the HTP by pushing the controlled topics into it for malicious customers with the goal of guiding public opinions.To hijack HTP,the agents of BTS maintain an army of black-market accounts called bogus trafic accounts(BTAs)and control BTAs to generate a burst of fake trafic by massively retweeting the tweets containing the customer desired topic(hashtag).Although this service has been extensively exploited by malicious customers,little has been done to understand it.In this paper,we conduct a systematic measurement study of the BTS.We first investigate and collect 125 BTS agents from a variety of sources and set up a honey pot account to capture BTAs from these agents.We then build a BTA detector that detects 162218 BTAs from Weibo,the largest Chinese microblogging site,with a precision of 94.5%.We further use them as a bridge to uncover 296916 topics that might be involved in bogus trafic.Finally,we uncover the operating mechanism from the perspectives of the attack cycle and the attack entity.The highlights of our findings include the temporal attack patterns and intelligent evasion tactics of the BTAs.These findings bring BTS into the spotlight.Our work will help in understanding and ultimately eliminating this threat.

RecGuard: An efficient privacy preservation blockchain-based system for online social network users

Recommendation systems provide ease and convenience for users to address information overload problems while interacting with online platforms such as social media and e-commerce.However,it raises several questions about privacy,especially for users who prefer to remain anonymous,especially on online social networks(OSNs).Moreover,due to the commercialization of online users'data,some service providers sell users'data to third parties at the blind side of the users,which leads to trust issues between users and service providers.Such matters call for a system that gives online users much-needed control and autonomy of their data.With the advancement of blockchain technology,many research institutions are experimenting with decentralized technologies to resolve the OSN user dilemma of privacy intrusion against third parties and hacks.To resolve these limitations,we propose RecGuard,a privacy preservation blockchain-based network system.We developed two smart contracts,RG-SH and RG-ST,to ensure the security and privacy of user data.The RG-SH manages user data,whereas the RGST stores data.A graph convolutional network(GCN)was integrated with the blockchain-based system to detect malicious nodes.Finally,we implemented our framework prototype on a locally simulated network.The analysis and experiment results show that the proposed scheme demonstrates the effectiveness and privacy of users in our framework.

Spotted Hyena Optimizer with Deep Learning Driven Cybersecurity for Social Networks

Recent developments on Internet and social networking have led to the growth of aggressive language and hate speech.Online provocation,abuses,and attacks are widely termed cyberbullying(CB).The massive quantity of user generated content makes it difficult to recognize CB.Current advancements in machine learning(ML),deep learning(DL),and natural language processing(NLP)tools enable to detect and classify CB in social networks.In this view,this study introduces a spotted hyena optimizer with deep learning driven cybersecurity(SHODLCS)model for OSN.The presented SHODLCS model intends to accomplish cybersecurity from the identification of CB in the OSN.For achieving this,the SHODLCS model involves data pre-processing and TF-IDF based feature extraction.In addition,the cascaded recurrent neural network(CRNN)model is applied for the identification and classification of CB.Finally,the SHO algorithm is exploited to optimally tune the hyperparameters involved in the CRNN model and thereby results in enhanced classifier performance.The experimental validation of the SHODLCS model on the benchmark dataset portrayed the better outcomes of the SHODLCS model over the recent approaches.

Generalized Jaccard Similarity Based Recurrent DNN for Virtualizing Social Network Communities

In social data analytics,Virtual Community(VC)detection is a primary challenge in discovering user relationships and enhancing social recommenda-tions.VC formation is used for personal interaction between communities.But the usual methods didn’t find the Suspicious Behaviour(SB)needed to make a VC.The Generalized Jaccard Suspicious Behavior Similarity-based Recurrent Deep Neural Network Classification and Ranking(GJSBS-RDNNCR)Model addresses these issues.The GJSBS-RDNNCR model comprises four layers for VC formation in Social Networks(SN).In the GJSBS-RDNNCR model,the SN is given as an input at the input layer.After that,the User’s Behaviors(UB)are extracted in the first Hidden Layer(HL),and the Generalized Jaccard Similarity coefficient calculates the similarity value at the second HL based on the SB.In the third HL,the similarity values are examined,and SB tendency is classified using the Activation Function(AF)in the Output Layer(OL).Finally,the ranking process is performed with classified users in SN and their SB.Results analysis is performed with metrics such as Classification Accuracy(CA),Time Complexity(TC),and False Positive Rate(FPR).The experimental setup consid-ers 250 tweet users from the dataset to identify the SBs of users.

A Differentially Private Auction Mechanism in Online Social Networks

The growing popularity of users in online social network gives a big opportunity for online auction.The famous Information Diffusion Mechanism(IDM)is an excellent method even meet the incentive compatibility and individual rationality.Although the existing auction in online social network has considered the buyers’information which is not known by the seller,current mechanism still can not preserve the privacy information of users in online social network.In this paper,we propose a novel mechanism based on the IDM and differential privacy.Our mechanism can successfully process the auction and at the same time preserve clients’price information from neighbours.We achieved these by adding virtual nodes to each node and Laplace noise for its price in the auction process.We also formulate this mechanism on the real network and the random network,scale-free network to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.The evaluation shows that the result of our methods only depend on the noise added to the agents.It is independent from the agents’original price.

Coronavirus Pandemic Analysis Through Tripartite Graph Clustering in Online Social Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world hard.The reaction to the pandemic related issues has been pouring into social platforms,such as Twitter.Many public officials and governments use Twitter to make policy announcements.People keep close track of the related information and express their concerns about the policies on Twitter.It is beneficial yet challenging to derive important information or knowledge out of such Twitter data.In this paper,we propose a Tripartite Graph Clustering for Pandemic Data Analysis(TGC-PDA)framework that builds on the proposed models and analysis:(1)tripartite graph representation,(2)non-negative matrix factorization with regularization,and(3)sentiment analysis.We collect the tweets containing a set of keywords related to coronavirus pandemic as the ground truth data.Our framework can detect the communities of Twitter users and analyze the topics that are discussed in the communities.The extensive experiments show that our TGC-PDA framework can effectively and efficiently identify the topics and correlations within the Twitter data for monitoring and understanding public opinions,which would provide policy makers useful information and statistics for decision making.

Enhanced Clustering Based OSN Privacy Preservation to Ensure k-Anonymity, t-Closeness, l-Diversity, and Balanced Privacy Utility

Online Social Networks (OSN) sites allow end-users to share agreat deal of information, which may also contain sensitive information,that may be subject to commercial or non-commercial privacy attacks. Asa result, guaranteeing various levels of privacy is critical while publishingdata by OSNs. The clustering-based solutions proved an effective mechanismto achieve the privacy notions in OSNs. But fixed clustering limits theperformance and scalability. Data utility degrades with increased privacy,so balancing the privacy utility trade-off is an open research issue. Theresearch has proposed a novel privacy preservation model using the enhancedclustering mechanism to overcome this issue. The proposed model includesphases like pre-processing, enhanced clustering, and ensuring privacy preservation.The enhanced clustering algorithm is the second phase where authorsmodified the existing fixed k-means clustering using the threshold approach.The threshold value is determined based on the supplied OSN data of edges,nodes, and user attributes. Clusters are k-anonymized with multiple graphproperties by a novel one-pass algorithm. After achieving the k-anonymityof clusters, optimization was performed to achieve all privacy models, suchas k-anonymity, t-closeness, and l-diversity. The proposed privacy frameworkachieves privacy of all three network components, i.e., link, node, and userattributes, with improved utility. The authors compare the proposed techniqueto underlying methods using OSN Yelp and Facebook datasets. The proposedapproach outperformed the underlying state of art methods for Degree ofAnonymization, computational efficiency, and information loss.

Machine Learning Techniques for Detecting Phishing URL Attacks

Cyber Attacks are critical and destructive to all industry sectors.They affect social engineering by allowing unapproved access to a Personal Computer(PC)that breaks the corrupted system and threatens humans.The defense of security requires understanding the nature of Cyber Attacks,so prevention becomes easy and accurate by acquiring sufficient knowledge about various features of Cyber Attacks.Cyber-Security proposes appropriate actions that can handle and block attacks.A phishing attack is one of the cybercrimes in which users follow a link to illegal websites that will persuade them to divulge their private information.One of the online security challenges is the enormous number of daily transactions done via phishing sites.As Cyber-Security have a priority for all organizations,Cyber-Security risks are considered part of an organization’s risk management process.This paper presents a survey of different modern machine-learning approaches that handle phishing problems and detect with high-quality accuracy different phishing attacks.A dataset consisting of more than 11000 websites from the Kaggle dataset was utilized and studying the effect of 30 website features and the resulting class label indicating whether or not it is a phishing website(1 or−1).Furthermore,we determined the confusion matrices of Machine Learning models:Neural Networks(NN),Na飗e Bayes,and Adaboost,and the results indicated that the accuracies achieved were 90.23%,92.97%,and 95.43%,respectively.

A Query-Based Greedy Approach for Authentic Influencer Discovery in SIoT

The authors propose an informed search greedy approach that efficiently identifies the influencer nodes in the social Internet of Things with the ability to provide legitimate information.Primarily,the proposed approach minimizes the network size and eliminates undesirable connections.For that,the proposed approach ranks each of the nodes and prioritizes them to identify an authentic influencer.Therefore,the proposed approach discards the nodes having a rank(α)lesser than 0.5 to reduce the network complexity.αis the variable value represents the rank of each node that varies between 0 to 1.Node with the higher value ofαgets the higher priority and vice versa.The threshold valueα=0.5 defined by the authors with respect to their network pruning requirements that can be vary with respect to other research problems.Finally,the algorithm in the proposed approach traverses the trimmed network to identify the authentic node to obtain the desired information.The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of time complexity and accuracy by executing the algorithm on both the original and pruned networks.Experimental results show that the approach identifies authentic influencers on a resultant network in significantly less time than in the original network.Moreover,the accuracy of the proposed approach in identifying the influencer node is significantly higher than that of the original network.Furthermore,the comparison of the proposed approach with the existing approaches demonstrates its efficiency in terms of time consumption and network traversal through the minimum number of hops.

Real-Time Spammers Detection Based on Metadata Features with Machine Learning

Spammer detection is to identify and block malicious activities performing users.Such users should be identified and terminated from social media to keep the social media process organic and to maintain the integrity of online social spaces.Previous research aimed to find spammers based on hybrid approaches of graph mining,posted content,and metadata,using small and manually labeled datasets.However,such hybrid approaches are unscalable,not robust,particular dataset dependent,and require numerous parameters,complex graphs,and natural language processing(NLP)resources to make decisions,which makes spammer detection impractical for real-time detection.For example,graph mining requires neighbors’information,posted content-based approaches require multiple tweets from user profiles,then NLP resources to make decisions that are not applicable in a real-time environment.To fill the gap,firstly,we propose a REal-time Metadata based Spammer detection(REMS)model based on only metadata features to identify spammers,which takes the least number of parameters and provides adequate results.REMS is a scalable and robust model that uses only 19 metadata features of Twitter users to induce 73.81%F1-Score classification accuracy using a balanced training dataset(50%spam and 50%genuine users).The 19 features are 8 original and 11 derived features from the original features of Twitter users,identified with extensive experiments and analysis.Secondly,we present the largest and most diverse dataset of published research,comprising 211 K spam users and 1 million genuine users.The diversity of the dataset can be measured as it comprises users who posted 2.1 million Tweets on seven topics(100 hashtags)from 6 different geographical locations.The REMS’s superior classification performance with multiple machine and deep learning methods indicates that only metadata features have the potential to identify spammers rather than focusing on volatile posted content and complex graph structures.Dataset and REMS’s codes are available on GitHub(www.github.com/mhadnanali/REMS).

Agent-Based Simulation of Rumor Propagation on Social Network Based on Active Immune Mechanism

To simulate the rumor propagation process on online social network during emergency, a new rumor propagation model was built based on active immune mechanism. The rumor propagation mechanisms were analyzed and corresponding parameters were defined. BA scale free network and NW small world network that can be used for representing the online social network structure were constructed and their characteristics were compared. Agent-based simulations were conducted on both networks and results show that BA scale free network is more conductive to spreading rumors and it can facilitate the rumor refutation process at the same time. Rumors paid attention to by more people is likely to spread quicker and broader but for which the rumor refutation process will be more effective. The model provides a useful tool for understanding and predicting the rumor propagation process on online social network during emergency, providing useful instructions for rumor propagation intervention.

A Multi-Agent Based Model for User Interest Mining on Sina Weibo

User interest mining on Sina Weibo is the basis of personalized recommendations,advertising,marketing promotions,and other tasks.Although great progress has been made in this area,previous studies have ignored the differences among users:the varied behaviors and habits that lead to unique user data characteristics.It is unreasonable to use a single strategy to mine interests from such varied user data.Therefore,this paper proposes an adaptive model for user interest mining based on a multi-agent system whose input includes self-descriptive user data,microblogs and correlations.This method has the ability to select the appropriate strategy based on each user’s data characteristics.The experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than the baselines.

Customized Share Level Monitoring System for Users in OSN-Third Party Applications

Preserving privacy of the user is a very critical requirement to be metwith all the international laws like GDPR, California privacy protection act andmany other bills in place. On the other hand, Online Social Networks (OSN)has a wide spread recognition among the users, as a means of virtual communication. OSN may also acts as an identity provider for both internal and externalapplications. While it provides a simplified identification and authentication function to users across multiple applications, it also opens the users to a new spectrum of privacy threats. The privacy breaches costs to the users as well as tothe OSN. Despite paying millions of dollars as fine every year, the OSN hasnot done any significant changes, as data is the fuel and what it loses as fine isfar less compared to the money OSN makes out of the shared data. In this work,we have discussed a wide range of possible privacy threats and solutions prevailing in OSN-Third Party Application (TPA) data sharing scenario. Our solutionmodels the behavior of the user, as well as TPA and pinpoints the avenues of oversharing to the users, thereby limiting the privacy loss of the user.

A Review of Gaps between Usability and Security/Privacy

Different domains of computing systems require higher level of focus towards specific quality factors like privacy, integrity, flexibility, usability etc. Moreover, certain quality factors help in each other’s existence while others oppose each other significantly. Usability of software applications is one factor that reduces security and privacy up to a substantial level. This paper examines the differences between usability factors and aspects related to security and privacy. A clear understanding of gaps between these two opposing factors has been presented in this paper. In addition, an account of efforts carried out to bridge these gaps has also been presented. We have divided these efforts into the categories of guidelines, frameworks and use of technology. The fields of e-banking and social networks have been considered specifically for identification of gaps in these particular fields.

Approximating Special Social Influence Maximization Problems

Social Influence Maximization Problems(SIMPs)deal with selecting k seeds in a given Online Social Network(OSN)to maximize the number of eventually-influenced users.This is done by using these seeds based on a given set of influence probabilities among neighbors in the OSN.Although the SIMP has been proved to be NP-hard,it has both submodular(with a natural diminishing-return)and monotone(with an increasing influenced users through propagation)that make the problem suitable for approximation solutions.However,several special SIMPs cannot be modeled as submodular or monotone functions.In this paper,we look at several conditions under which non-submodular or non-monotone functions can be handled or approximated.One is a profit-maximization SIMP where seed selection cost is included in the overall utility function,breaking the monotone property.The other is a crowd-influence SIMP where crowd influence exists in addition to individual influence,breaking the submodular property.We then review several new techniques and notions,including double-greedy algorithms and the supermodular degree,that can be used to address special SIMPs.Our main results show that for a specific SIMP model,special network structures of OSNs can help reduce its time complexity of the SIMP.