Promotional Campaigns in the Era of Social Platforms

by

Noor Abu-El-Rub

B.S., Computer Science, Jordan University of Science and Technology, 2011

M.S., Computer Science, Jordan University of Science and Technology, 2013

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of New Mexico, 2019

Abstract

The rise of social media has facilitated the diffusion of information to reach millions of users more easily. While many users connect with friends and organically share information and opinions on social media, others have exploited these platforms to gain influence and profit through promotional campaigns and advertising. The existence of such campaigns contributes to the spread of misleading information, spam, and fake news. Consequently, these activities affect the trustworthiness and reliability of social media, transforming it into a crowd-based advertising platform. This dissertation investigates the presence of promotional campaigns on social media and explores how both users and bots (i.e., automated accounts)

engage in such activities. We design a suite of detection, ranking, and mining techniques to analyze these behaviors. Specifically, we study user-generated reviews on e-commerce  platforms such as Google Play to extract and identify promotional campaigns. We also detect  cooperating sets of bots and classify their interactions on social networks such as Twitter,  ranking them according to their level of malevolence. Our findings reveal that modern online social interactions are significantly influenced by promotional campaigns, including political, commercial, and incentive-driven efforts, and demonstrate how these campaigns can shape the information consumption of millions of social media users.

​​