Revealing censored information through comments and commenters in online social networks

Abstract

In this work we study information leakage through discussions in online social networks. In particular, we focus on articles published by news pages, in which a person's name is censored, and we examine whether the person is identifiable (de-censored) by analyzing comments and social network graphs of commenters. As a case study for our proposed methodology, in this paper we considered 48 articles (Israeli, military related) with censored content, followed by a threaded discussion. We qualitatively study the set of comments and identify comments (in this case referred as "leakers") and the commenter and the censored person. We denote these commenters as "leakers". We found that such comments are present for some 75% of the articles we considered. Finally, leveraging the social network graphs of the leakers, and specifically the overlap among the graphs of the leakers, we are able to identify the censored person. We show the viability of our methodology through some illustrative use cases.