Online product reviews skewed by paid posters
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/internet/Online+product+reviews+skewed+paid+posters/5886212/story.html
So, you're shopping for a new big-screen television, decide to go googling for some consumer reviews.
Sure enough, you find a site where an enthusiastic buyer blogs about the new 50-inch Whatever being the best thing to happen to broadcasting since Don Cherry choked on his gum.
But wait! Someone else has posted a comment saying the Whatever emits enough radiation to kill the average cat.
Which one is right? Perhaps neither. Perhaps the comments have been left by what the Chinese call the "Internet water army" of people paid to post online messages promoting or slagging a given product.
And now graduate student Cheng Chen and his supervising professors at UVic hope their research will breed software that makes it easier to detect the purchased posts. In fact, Cheng actually signed up as a paid poster to gain insight into how the schemes work.
Cheng came to UVic last year from China, where news media have been writing about the water army - its name comes from its ability to quickly flood the Internet - made up mainly of college students and unemployed people hired to post comments on websites and add threads to online discussions. Often it is PR companies that dip into China's pool of 457 million Internet users to, say, create a buzz around a new TV show or market a product.
While the UVic research focused on China - one of the case studies involved a scrap between Chinese IT rivals Tencent and Qihu 360 - the paid-poster practice is growing in the West, too.
"It might not be prevalent to the extent that it is in China, but it's catching up," UVic computer sciences professor Venkatesh Srinivasan said Monday. Just follow some of the workfromhome ads that pop up on your screen.
Cheng, Srinivasan, student Xudong Zhang (who has since returned to China) and UVic professor Kui Wu all contributed to a paper titled Battling The Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters (you can find it at arxiv.org/abs/1111.4297).
"The use of paid posters extends well beyond China," the research paper notes. "According to a recent news report in the Guardian, the U.S. military and a private corporation are developing a specific software that can be used to post information on social media websites using fake online identifications."
The authors fear that will lead other organizations and companies to follow suit, leading to a serious spamming problem.
Cheng points to University of Illinois research on the use of "opinion spam" to review products sold on Amazon.com. Computer scientists at the University of Santa Barbara just posted a paper on "crowdturfing" in which masses of Internet users are paid to skew public perception.
"I think this phenomenon has affected many people's lives," Cheng said Monday. The results undermine consumers' faith in online reviews. "You find that you cannot trust what you read."
The UVic research found patterns that make it possible to detect the use of hidden paid posters. It's curious when, for example, comments are blasted across multiple sites within a short period. Cheng's first-hand experience showed him the organizational structure of hidden-poster campaigns.
There are also clues in the content. Have you ever seen a discussion thread interrupted by a comment that seems slightly out of context or flat-out nonsensical? Those who are paid according to the number of comments they post - typically 30 to 50 cents each - aren't particularly fussy about where the posts go or what they say.
The UVic team is now looking at the use of paid posters on questionandanswer forums, the kind where one computer poses a query - "Anybody know the best place to eat in Oslo?" - and others reply.
Sometimes it's an organized effort, with one person paid to post the initial question, and others to provide the desired answer.
Cheng and friends hope to develop an online aid that would let consumers check for paid posts on their own. That would be valuable, as the wisdom of crowds, the democracy promised by the Internet, is corrupted when the wisdom is bought and paid for.
| 
發表於 2011-12-21 06:55
|