Title
Who framed Roger Reindeer? De-censorship of Facebook posts by snippet classification.
Abstract
This paper considers online news censorship and it concentrates on censorship of identities. Obfuscating identities may occur for disparate reasons, from military to judiciary ones. In the majority of cases, this happens to protect individuals from being identified and persecuted by hostile people. However, being the collaborative web characterised by a redundancy of information, it is not unusual that the same fact is reported by multiple sources, which may not apply the same restriction policies in terms of censorship. Also, the proven aptitude of social network users to disclose personal information leads to the phenomenon that comments to news can reveal the data withheld in the news itself. This gives us a mean to figure out who the subject of the censored news is. We propose an adaptation of a text analysis approach to unveil censored identities. The approach is tested on a synthesised scenario, which however resembles a real use case. Leveraging a text analysis based on a context classifier trained over snippets from posts and comments of Facebook pages, we achieve promising results. Despite the quite constrained settings in which we operate – such as considering only snippets of very short length – our system successfully detects the censored name, choosing among 10 different candidate names, in more than 50% of the investigated cases. This outperforms the results of two reference baselines. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported by a thorough experimental methodology and interesting on their own, also pave the way for further investigation on the insidious issues of censorship on the web.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.osnem.2018.04.002
Online Social Networks and Media
Keywords
DocType
Volume
News censorship,Identities censorship,Text mining,Data correlation,Privacy in social networks,Social media mining,Facebook,Named entity recognition,Candidateentity recognition,Transparency
Journal
6
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2468-6964
0
0.34
References 
Authors
20
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fabio Del Vigna1232.44
Marinella Petrocchi236244.01
Alessandro Tommasi3355.03
Cesare Zavattari4102.62
Maurizio Tesconi528132.06