Abstract

We live in a time where Social Media can be a powerful vehicle for shaping public opinion. As such, they represent a perfect ground for information manipulation. Online information manipulation can take many forms and impact all kinds of domains. In particular, the financial domain has also been the subject of disinformation efforts in our online social ecosystems, becoming an increasingly addressed problem due to its potential social and economic implications. In this seminar, we introduce the problem of online financial disinformation and describe its potential consequences with examples from the recent past. Then, we provide an extensive analysis and investigation of manipulation on financial stock microblogs, exposing new disinformation strategies and proposing methods for detecting these threats. Finally, we analyze and characterize cryptocurrency manipulation within a vast online ecosystem across many relevant social media platforms.

Bio

Serena Tardelli is a PostDoc Research Fellow in the Cyber Intelligence Unit at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council (IIT-CNR) in Pisa, Italy. She received her PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Pisa in 2022. She received her master’s degree in Computer Science – Business Informatics from the University of Pisa in 2017. Her research interests fall at the intersection of Data Science and Web Science, with a particular focus on the fight against disinformation, misinformation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior (e.g., social bots, trolls) in many online domains such as politics, health, finance and cryptocurrency. Serena published research papers, attended, and presented her works in several national and international conferences (e.g., AAAI ICWSM, Springer HCII, Springer IRCDL). She also published results of her research in several national and international peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Decision Support Systems, Information Systems, IEEE Access, ACM Transaction on The Web). Results of her research activity have also been discussed in local and national newspapers, and scientific blogs. She also served as a reviewer for several international conferences and journals (e.g., AAAI ICWSM, IEEE DSAA, Springer SocInfo, AAAI FLAIRS, Elsevier OSNEM).