MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis
This addresses the challenge of disinformation campaigns for social media users and platforms, though it appears incremental as it combines existing technologies into a pipeline.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting manipulated social media images in real-time by presenting MEWS, a system that identifies such items as they emerge and spread, with results showing it can track trends across platforms.
This article presents a beta-version of MEWS (Misinformation Early Warning System). It describes the various aspects of the ingestion, manipulation detection, and graphing algorithms employed to determine--in near real-time--the relationships between social media images as they emerge and spread on social media platforms. By combining these various technologies into a single processing pipeline, MEWS can identify manipulated media items as they arise and identify when these particular items begin trending on individual social media platforms or even across multiple platforms. The emergence of a novel manipulation followed by rapid diffusion of the manipulated content suggests a disinformation campaign.