Artificial Intelligence Colloquium - Dr. Rebekah Overdorf, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Title: Understanding Mechanisms to Combat Malicious Content

Abstract:

Social media platforms are rife with actors spreading malicious content, including spam, scams, propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. Many approaches to combating malicious content rely heavily on machine learning to detect this "bad stuff" by analysing the content itself or associated metadata. While these ML-based detectors are valuable, they are often insufficient on their own. In this talk, I argue that to effectively combat malicious content, we must go beyond detection and focus on understanding the underlying mechanisms and manipulative tactics that malicious actors use to spread or amplify their content. By uncovering these mechanisms, we can improve ML-based approaches by 1) building more tailored and robust detectors and (2) identifying intervention points to disrupt attacks at their source. I will demonstrate how combining ML-based methods with an understanding of adversarial tactics can lead to more robust defences.