Ricerc@Sapienza

This project proposes the design and the sperimentation of the MISSION system (My Information Shield for Social Networks). Such a system intends to automatically identify the information received by users of a social network to help them to defend themselves against threats like scam, cyberbullying or sexual predation, and to avoid access to suspicious, misleading, and fake data.

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are an ideal place for Internet users to keep in touch, share information about their daily activities and interests, publishing and accessing documents, photos and videos. SNSs like Facebook, Twitter or Google+ give the ability to create a semi-public profile, to have a list of peers to interact with and to post and to read what others have posted.

According to Alexa's statistics, Google and Facebook are the first websites for exchanged traffic, while Twitter is anyway within the top ten: together they count around 2 billion of users. Unfortunately, SNSs are also the ideal plaza for proliferation of harmful information. Scam, cyberbullying, sexual predation, self-harm practices, deceptive reviews, fake accounts and links to malware are the effective results of the dissemination of malicious information on SNSs. Although the few experienced users could be able to face threats and distinguish between deceptive and honest content, such a challenge cannot be easily won by the great majority of users: Media frequently report evidences about the consequences that naïve and quite emotive users have faced to.
Our commitment is, therefore, to limit the harmfulness of a certain kind of information exchanged on SNSs, providing an effective tool that can help all social network users. MISSION provides a software system able to identify the harmful and threatening contents users are exposed to, that will be clearly tagged to help the user to recognize the threat she is involved in.