2020 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)

The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security

for Social Media
Bhavani Thuraisingham
Computer Science Dept.
The University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, USA
bxt043000@utdallas.edu

Abstract— Social media systems such as Facebook and Twitter
are playing a major role in society connecting over a billion people
worldwide and enabling them to communicate and share
information with each other as well as within a group of
individuals. These social media systems can vastly help humanity
such as spread information about infectious diseases and discuss
solutions to problems faced by humanity including preventing
child trafficking and violence against women. However, social
media systems can also do harm, such as shared false information,
more popularly known as fake news, as well as violating the
privacy of individuals. With the proliferation of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) systems together with powerful machine learning
techniques as well as the cyber-attacks on information systems are
changing the way the social media systems are being used by
humans. This paper discusses the role of both AI and Cyber
Security for social media systems including the benefits of AI as
well as protecting social media systems.
Keywords—social media, AI, artificial intelligence, cyber
security, cyber attack, privacy, integrating
I. INTRODUCTION
Social media systems such as Facebook and Twitter are
being used for the good of humanity. For example, these systems
can inform the users of the spread of diseases, provide for the
support for emergency preparedness as well as enable the
sharing of information so that the users are better informed about
various topics such as politics and sports. Various analytics tools
are being applied on these systems to extract information not
only about the users but also about the contents of their posts.
While the nuggets that are extracted could help humanity, they
can also compromise individual privacy. In addition, social
media systems have also been the vehicle for spreading false
rumors that could be damaging to the individuals and cause great
harm. In addition, the social media systems as well as the
analysis techniques could be compromised due to cyber-attacks
and as a result the information posted could be compromised.
This paper explores the use of the applications of AI techniques
for social media as well as examines how social media systems
could be protected from cyber-attacks. In addition, the privacy
violations that could occur are also addressed. A comprehensive
discussion on analyzing and securing social media is provided
in [1]. This paper explores some of the emerging challenges we
are faced with due to the fake news being posted and the novel
cyber-attacks on social media systems.
The organization of this paper is as follows. AI for social
media is discussed in Section II. In particular, the use of
machine learning techniques to extract useful information and
help humans as well as the use of AI for the challenging problem
of determining fake news will be discussed. Security and
privacy for social media systems will be discussed in Section III.
For example, access control for social media systems as well as
the privacy violations that could occur due to analyzing the
social media data will be discussed. Integrating AI and security
for social media will be the subject of Section IV. For example,
the machine learning techniques applied to social media data
could be attacked. Therefore, adversarial machine learning
techniques for handling such attacks will be discussed. Finally,
the paper is summarized in Section V that will also include a
discussion of future directions.
II. AI FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Machine learning techniques have been applied for
numerous social media applications including for Twitter and
Facebook. For example, the machine learning techniques can
predict the location of the user, carry out sentiment analysis as
well as make recommendations. Some of the applications are
discussed in the InXite system that provides multiple analytics
capabilities [2]. Machine learning techniques can also be used to
determine the important people in a social media system as well
as make predictions about where the disease will spread next.
Numerous benefits have been reported to handle emergency
activities during earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, terrorism
events and the spread of deadly diseases. These techniques have
also been used to locate the epicenter of disasters and send relief
in timely manner. A useful discussion about emergency
preparedness and social media is given in [3].
Next, social media systems are subject to cyber-attacks. For
example, malicious software could change the contents of the
messages posted. Such software could also create fake profiles
that would then post false information. The images and video
contents posted on social media could also be subject to attacks.
Finally, the machines and mobile phones used by the users of
the social media could be attacked and could in turn infect a
large part of the social media system. The question then is how
can machine learning techniques detect such malicious activity.
Numerous efforts have been reported in applying machine
learning for detecting malware (e.g., [4]). So, what we need to

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DOI 10.1109/IPDPSW50202.2020.00184

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investigate is how can we apply such techniques to the new types
of attacks that pertain to social media systems?
A closely related question is how to handle fake news. For
example, fake news can result due to malicious software.
However, most often the fake news can result due to the humans
viciously posting false rumors such as a prominent person being
a pedophile, or another prominent person embezzling millions
of dollars. Detecting such fake news is a huge challenge. There
is some work in this area [5]. What must be done is train the
machine models with numerous articles about an event or a
person. These articles will clearly show that the person is not a
pedophile and is indeed a respected individual. Once the model
is trained then the new articles have to be tested and based on
the training, it can make a determination as to whether the person
is a pedophile or not. The problem is that the news stories are
evolving and also arriving continuously. Therefore, some of the
techniques that have been developed for analyzing evolving data
streams could be used to detect fake news [6], [7]. Another
solution to the problem is identifying the source of the fake
news. Therefore, some of the solutions proposed for the data
provenance should be investigated further for fake news
applications [8].
III. SECURITY AND PRIVACY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
As stated in Section II, the social media systems could be
attacked via malicious software. For example, the posting of the
users could be maliciously altered. The malicious software could
also emanate from the infected machines of the users or from the
content they post such as images and video already
compromised. Machine learning techniques are being explored
to detect such malicious software. In addition, access control
models for social media systems have also been developed [9].
These access control models provide fine-grained access to the
social media data. In addition, the appropriate identification and
authentication techniques are needed to ensure the identity of the
users. One of the challenges of the social media systems is
detecting fake users. These fake users do have legitimate email
addresses. However, they provide false information about them
and post nasty gossip that is often false information. The
question is how can the fable rumors be detected and blocked
[10]. Machine learning techniques are being examined to detect
such fake profiles. But a big problem is that the fake profiles
may be created by malicious software and bots and may make
very little change to the content but one that could result in a
huge impact. The challenge the cyber security researchers have
is to detect such malicious software.
Another problem with social media systems is protecting the
privacy of individuals. Now, one can say that it is up to the
individual to determine what information to post about him or
her. However, sometimes the individuals can get carried away
and post disparate information about themselves which
collectively could result in their privacy being violated. The
individual could post photos of spending vacations say in the
Bahamas which can alert thieves to rob the individual’s home.
So, should it be up to the social media system to ask the
individual the question “do you really want to post this
information?” and then explain the potential privacy violations?
There is work on privacy aspects of social media systems [11],
but we also need to understand what is meant by privacy
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violations in such systems. Is there a privacy measure? A closely
related problem is the inference problem where collections of
information could be highly classified while individual pieces
may be unclassified. We have developed solutions to this
problem by implementing inference controllers [12]. Should a
social media system include an inference engine that can reason
about the information posted and then alert the individuals that
by posting additional information security may be violated?
IV. INTEGRATING AI AND SECURITY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
Section II discussed how machine learning techniques may
be used to detect sentiments as well as fake news. It also
discussed how they could be applied to detect malicious
software. Section III discussed security and privacy
considerations for social media and some potential solutions. So
now the question is, what are the security and privacy problems
for using machine learning techniques for social media systems?
First of all, the Machine learning techniques could be
attacked. That is, the attacker could figure out the learning model
and try and thwart the model. The defender would then adapt the
model. The attacker would learn about the new model and try
and thwart it. This then becomes a game played between the
attacker and the defender. This has come to be known
adversarial machine learning [13]. There is now extensive
research on this topic. However, we need to investigate the
impact of the solutions proposed on social media systems. That
is, how can we adapt the machine learning techniques being
applied to social media systems so that they can overcome the
cyber-attacks? The privacy problems that result due to machine
learning has been studied for nearly two decades [14]. It is now
possible to use machine learning and extract nuggets that could
be highly private (or sensitive). Various privacy-preserving
machine learning techniques are being developed. The challenge
is how do we adapt these techniques for social media systems?
There is some discussion in [15] and the issues and challenges
need to be explored further. More recently there are some
initiatives by organizations such as the United Nations on “AI
for Good”. So, the challenge we are faced with is, how can AI
be for good in the midst of cyber-attacks and privacy violations?
[16] Also, what is the impact of social media on AI for Good?
V. SUMMARY AND DIRECTIONS
This paper has discussed the benefits of social media and the
application of machine learning techniques for social media. For
example, machine learning techniques are being used to detect
the sentiment of the users and to provide information on the
spread of deadly diseases as well as prevent child trafficking. It
also discussed the use of machine learning for detecting fake
news and malicious software. Next, the paper discussed security
and privacy issues for social media systems including access
control models and privacy aware social media systems. Finally,
the paper discussed the integration of AI ad cyber security for
social media systems such as adversarial machine learning and
the inference and privacy problems.
The role of AI and security for social media systems is just
beginning. With the advent of the AI for Good initiative as well
as the emergence of Fair AI and Bias in AI, we can expect more
investigation on the applications of such AI areas in social
media. Cyber security attacks and privacy violations add
complexities to the problem of using AI. For example, how can
AI be for good in social media with cyber-attacks and privacy
violations? How can we extend adversarial machine learning for
social media? How can we measure privacy in social media?
How can false rumors be detected and blocked? While some
progress has been made there is still much to be done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank Dr. Latifur Khan and Dr. Murat
Kantarcioglu for their technical discussions. I also would like to
thank Rhonda Walls and Brian Ricks for their comments.
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