Residency Period: August 1, 2019 to July 31, 2020
Resident at IEAT, Fabrício Benevenuto is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UFMG in 2010 and was the winner of the Capes de Theses award, 2011 edition. Fabrício was a visiting researcher at HP research Labs in Palo Alto/CA and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and held the position of professor Adjunct in the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Ouro Preto for two years, where he coordinated the graduate program. His current projects focus on measuring and modeling user behavior in social web systems. He has participated as a program committee member at several major web-related events such as the WWW, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, and ICWSM conferences. His research has produced a large number of widely cited articles (over 9500 citations and h-index 37). He was an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (from 2013 to 2017) and recently received a prestigious grant from the Humboldt foundation, through which he was a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute (2017 to 2018).
TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CONTAIN MISINFORMATION, MANIPULATION AND EXTREMISM ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS
The 2016 American elections and the 2018 Brazilian elections questioned the belief that social networks came to bring the libertarian ideal and democratization. Social networks have become the stage for a true war of information during election periods. As social networks are environments where people influence and are influenced, there is a lot of space on these platforms for political marketing to act in an abusive way. In the USA, political marketing strategies abused advertisements promoted on Facebook turned the debate about the American elections into chaos. In Brazil, the biggest one happened through WhatsApp. The rapid dissemination and wide spread of information are properties of social networks that can be abused for unsolicited advertising, interruption of legitimate communication or even campaigns to manipulate opinion through these platforms. Social networks have been a propitious environment for the spreading of rumors or slander and very little is known about the credibility of the information that spreads in these systems. In this context, this project presents a proposal to mitigate this serious problem by seeking to bring transparency to political campaigns carried out on social networks. Our main objective is to provide technological solutions capable of giving transparency to political campaigns through social media. By collecting large databases and monitoring media such as Facebook and Whatsapp, we intend to understand how disinformation campaigns operated in Brazil.