Video spam and public opinion in current Middle Eastern conflicts

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.