Panagiotis Papadopoulos

Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Dimitris Spithouris, Evangelos P. Markatos et al.

Automatic fake news detection is a challenging problem in misinformation spreading, and it has tremendous real-world political and social impacts. Past studies have proposed machine learning-based methods for detecting such fake news, focusing on different properties of the published news articles, such as linguistic characteristics of the actual content, which however have limitations due to the apparent language barriers. Departing from such efforts, we propose Fake News Detection-as-a Service (FNDaaS), the first automatic, content-agnostic fake news detection method, that considers new and unstudied features such as network and structural characteristics per news website. This method can be enforced as-a-Service, either at the ISP-side for easier scalability and maintenance, or user-side for better end-user privacy. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using more than 340K datapoints crawled from existing lists of 637 fake and 1183 real news websites, and by building and testing a proof of concept system that materializes our proposal. Our analysis of data collected from these websites shows that the vast majority of fake news domains are very young and appear to have lower time periods of an IP associated with their domain than real news ones. By conducting various experiments with machine learning classifiers, we demonstrate that FNDaaS can achieve an AUC score of up to 0.967 on past sites, and up to 77-92% accuracy on newly-flagged ones.

Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Peter Snyder, Dimitrios Athanasakis et al.

Funding the production of quality online content is a pressing problem for content producers. The most common funding method, online advertising, is rife with well-known performance and privacy harms, and an intractable subject-agent conflict: many users do not want to see advertisements, depriving the site of needed funding. Because of these negative aspects of advertisement-based funding, paywalls are an increasingly popular alternative for websites. This shift to a "pay-for-access" web is one that has potentially huge implications for the web and society. Instead of a system where information (nominally) flows freely, paywalls create a web where high quality information is available to fewer and fewer people, leaving the rest of the web users with less information, that might be also less accurate and of lower quality. Despite the potential significance of a move from an "advertising-but-open" web to a "paywalled" web, we find this issue understudied. This work addresses this gap in our understanding by measuring how widely paywalls have been adopted, what kinds of sites use paywalls, and the distribution of policies enforced by paywalls. A partial list of our findings include that (i) paywall use is accelerating (2x more paywalls every 6 months), (ii) paywall adoption differs by country (e.g. 18.75% in US, 12.69% in Australia), (iii) paywalls change how users interact with sites (e.g. higher bounce rates, less incoming links), (iv) the median cost of an annual paywall access is $108 per site, and (v) paywalls are in general trivial to circumvent. Finally, we present the design of a novel, automated system for detecting whether a site uses a paywall, through the combination of runtime browser instrumentation and repeated programmatic interactions with the site. We intend this classifier to augment future, longitudinal measurements of paywall use and behavior.