Mikloz Racz (Princeton)

An Adversarial Perspective on Network Disruption

I will discuss a simple new model of network disruption, where an adversary can take over a limited number of user profiles in a social network with the aim of maximizing disagreement and/or polarization in the network. I will present both theoretical and empirical results. Theoretically, we characterize aspects of the adversary’s optimal decisions and prove bounds on their disruptive power. Furthermore, we present a detailed empirical study of several natural algorithms for the adversary on both synthetic networks and real world (Reddit and Twitter) data sets. These show that even simple, unsophisticated heuristics, such as targeting centrists, can disrupt a network effectively. This is based on joint work with Mayee F. Chen.

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