A Collusion-Resistant Automation Scheme for Social Moderation Systems

For current Web 2.0 services, manual examination of user uploaded content is normally required to ensure its legitimacy and appropriateness, which is a substantial burden to service providers. To reduce labor costs and the delays caused by content censoring, social moderation has been proposed as a front-line mechanism, whereby user moderators are encouraged to examine content before system moderation is required. Given the immerse amount of new content added to the Web each day, there is a need for automation schemes to facilitate rear system moderation. This kind of mechanism is expected to automatically summarize reports from user moderators and ban misbehaving users or remove inappropriate content whenever possible. However, the accuracy of such schemes may be reduced by collusion attacks, where some work together to mislead the automatic summarization in order to obtain shared benefits. In this paper, we propose a collusion-resistant automation scheme for social moderation systems. Because some user moderators may collude and dishonestly claim that a user misbehaves, our scheme detects whether an accusation from a user moderator is fair or malicious based on the structure of mutual accusations of all users in the system. Through simulations we show that collusion attacks are likely to succeed if an intuitive count- based automation scheme is used. The proposed scheme, which is based on the community structure of the user accusation graph, achieves a decent performance in most scenarios.