Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms among youth, has recently come under scrutiny for potentially being harmful to the safety and well-being of our younger generations. Automated approaches for risk detection may be one way to help mitigate some of these risks if such algorithms are both accurate and contextual to the types of online harms youth face on social media platforms. However, the imminent switch by Instagram to end-to-end encryption for private conversations will limit the type of data that will be available to the platform to detect and mitigate such risks. In this paper, we investigate which indicators are most helpful in automatically detecting risk in Instagram private conversations, with an eye on high-level metadata, which will still be available in the scenario of end-to-end encryption. Toward this end, we collected Instagram data from 172 youth (ages 13-21) and asked them to identify private message conversations that made them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Our participants risk-flagged 28,725 conversations that contained 4,181,970 direct messages, including textual posts and images. Based on this rich and multimodal dataset, we tested multiple feature sets (metadata, linguistic cues, and image features) and trained classifiers to detect risky conversations. Overall, we found that the metadata features (e.g., conversation length, a proxy for participant engagement) were the best predictors of risky conversations. However, for distinguishing between risk types, the different linguistic and media cues were the best predictors. Based on our findings, we provide design implications for AI risk detection systems in the presence of end-to-end encryption. More broadly, our work contributes to the literature on adolescent online safety by moving toward more robust solutions for risk detection that directly takes into account the lived risk experiences of youth.
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Identifying Illicit Drug Dealers on Instagram with Large-scale Multimodal Data Fusion
Illicit drug trafficking via social media sites such as Instagram have become a severe problem, thus drawing a great deal of attention from law enforcement and public health agencies. How to identify illicit drug dealers from social media data has remained a technical challenge for the following reasons. On the one hand, the available data are limited because of privacy concerns with crawling social media sites; on the other hand, the diversity of drug dealing patterns makes it difficult to reliably distinguish drug dealers from common drug users. Unlike existing methods that focus on posting-based detection, we propose to tackle the problem of illicit drug dealer identification by constructing a large-scale multimodal dataset named Identifying Drug Dealers on Instagram (IDDIG). Nearly 4,000 user accounts, of which more than 1,400 are drug dealers, have been collected from Instagram with multiple data sources including post comments, post images, homepage bio, and homepage images. We then design a quadruple-based multimodal fusion method to combine the multiple data sources associated with each user account for drug dealer identification. Experimental results on the constructed IDDIG dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in identifying drug dealers (almost 95% accuracy). Moreover, we have developed a hashtag-based community detection technique for discovering evolving patterns, especially those related to geography and drug types.
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- PAR ID:
- 10319616
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2157-6904
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3472713
