Speaker: Prof. Dr. Stefano Cresci, Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT) National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy

Disinformation and manipulation campaigns are frequently carried out on social media with the aim to mislead and to influence online crowds. In order to be successful, each campaign must spread to and “infect” a large number of users. This often mandates large coordinated efforts, as well as the use of bot and troll armies, for the campaign to obtain significant outreach, to exert influence, and to have an impact.

So far, scholars mainly focused on disinformation about political and societal events. However, finance is emerging as an additional domain significantly affected by disinformation and online manipulation. In this talk we will discuss recent work in disinformation and online social media manipulation within the financial domain. Specifically, we will analyze several manipulation tactics targeting low-value stocks and cryptocurrencies and we will discuss possible computational solutions to contrast them. Findings from the financial domain will also be discussed in the broader context on online information warfare and manipulation.

The event belongs to the Topical Program (TP) Algorithmization and Social Interaction, which is part of the TP Initiative of the University of Münster and was initiated by a consortium of researchers from the Faculty of Law, School of Business and Economics, and Faculty of Educational and Social Science at University of Münster. The project is lead by Prof. Dr. Heike Trautmann (SBE, Department of Information Systems).

The event is open to the public and will be streamed via Zoom.

For more information, please visit: www.algorithmization.org