Title: Video spam and public opinion in current Middle Eastern conflicts

Authors: Izzat Alsmadi; Mohammed Naji Al-Kabi; Heider Wahsheh; Bassima Bassam

Addresses: Information Systems Department, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ' Faculty of Sciences and IT, Zarqa University, P.O. Box 2000, 13110 Zarqa, Jordan ' Computer Science Department, College of Computer Science, King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia ' CIS Department, Yarmouk University, P.O. Box 2000, 21163 Irbid, Jordan

Abstract: Social networks studies aim to discover the public opinions related to products, news, issues, etc. However, the level of trust or credibility of such public opinion evaluations may have the risk of being influenced artificially by opposite groups. Such deception can be easier to accomplish through the web in comparison with real life where face to face verification may challenge such deception methods. In this paper, we evaluated credibility in social networks. YouTube is used as a case study and we studied spamming techniques (e.g., keyword stuffing) that are widely used in this video streaming in order to improve visibility and bring public attention to the subject videos. Results and evaluation showed that currently such streaming applications do not impose any structural techniques on the kind of tagging or keywords that are included in the uploaded videos to ensure that such tags or keywords are relevant to the video content.

Keywords: web spam; video spam; information retrieval; social networks; public opinion; Middle Eastern conflicts; Middle East; trust; credibility; deception; video content; spamming techniques; keyword stuffing; video streaming.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNM.2013.059071

International Journal of Social Network Mining, 2013 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.318 - 333

Received: 06 Sep 2012
Accepted: 20 Mar 2013
Published online: 02 Jul 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article