• Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.33-48
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• 2019

The current Moon Jai-in administration in South Korea is facing serious challenges as a result of a scandal involving the manipulation of news online. Staff in Moon's camp are suspected of manipulating public opinion by creating millions of fake news comments online, contributing to Moon being elected president. This South Korean political scandal raises a number of theoretical issues with regard to new platform technologies and media manipulation. First, the incident exposes the technological limits of blocking manipulation of the news, partly because of the nature of social media and partly because of the nature of contemporary technology. Contemporary social media is often monopolistic in nature; with the majority of people are using the same platforms, and hence it is likely that they will be subject to forms of media manipulation. Second, the Korean case of news manipulation demonstrates a unique cultural aspect of Korean society. News comments and readers' replies have become a major channel of alternative news in Korea. This phenomenon is often designated as "reply journalism," since people are interested in reading the news replies of ordinary readers equally to reading news reports themselves. News replies are considered indicators of public opinion and are seen as affecting trias politica in Korean society. Third, the Korean incident of news manipulation implicates a new form of populism in the 21st century and the nature of democratic participation. This article aims to explicate key issues in media manipulation by including wider technological, cultural, and political aspects in the South Korean news media context.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1825-1844
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• 2019

Political campaigns circulate manipulative opinions in online communities to implant false beliefs and eventually win elections. Not only is this type of manipulation unfair, it also has long-lasting negative impacts on people's lives. Existing tools detect political manipulation based on a supervised classifier, which is accurate when trained with large labeled data. However, preparing this data becomes an excessive burden and must be repeated often to reflect changing manipulation tactics. We propose a practical detection system that requires moderate groundwork to achieve a sufficient level of accuracy. The proposed system groups opinions with similar properties into clusters, and then labels a few opinions from each cluster to build a classifier. It also models each opinion with features deduced from raw data with no additional processing. To validate the system, we collected over a million opinions during three nation-wide campaigns in South Korea. The system reduced groundwork from 200K to nearly 200 labeling tasks, and correctly identified over 90% of manipulative opinions. The system also effectively identified transitions in manipulative tactics over time. We suggest that online communities perform periodic audits using the proposed system to highlight manipulative opinions and emerging tactics.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.335-343
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• 2014

It is more important to ensure the credibility of internet media which influence the public opinion. However, there are vague suspicions in public from the examples of manipulation of online reviews with anonymity. In this study, we explore the possibility of manipulating public opinion in online web sites. We investigate the characteristics of comments posted by users on web sites and compare each comments by using the cosine similarity function. Our result shows followings. First, we found a correlation between the similarities of comments and the article ranks in the web sites. Second, it is possible to identify abnormal user activities indicating excessive multiple posting, double posting and astroturf activities.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.75-79
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• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to introspect again the role of the criminal law at a time when it is said that numerous criminal and legal discussions are needed to develop the so called "reply manipulation " case that is shaking the nation's political history. The research method considered the literature and precedents discussed in the past, and discussed the issue of subculture abuse caused by the internet, which is a product of convenience and affluence that came with the Forth industrial revolution through criminal law. Through a computer program, a discussion was held on what penalties would be imposed on the criminal law for attempting to manipulate public opinion by manipulating the so-called number of comments or Reaction. Question of whether the criminal law should further emphasize the need for a discussion on the need for a method to strengthen the preventive functions of the criminal law and expand the scope of punishment in order to address new causes of risk that came with the development of science. Without reflecting on whether such as "government-inspired demonstration "would be possible in today's world that was in the public perception of the authoritarian government of the past, it is a problem to see that the political goals of a particular group can be achieved by manipulating comments or creating public opinion on the Internet. The duty of criminal law is to protect the interests of the law. The role of the criminal law should be maintained the self limiting as far as possible in cases of violation or danger of the law. Still, it is a problem that the role of the criminal justice system today is too aggressive and is seen as a top tool rather than a last resort for solving problems. he role of the internet will be expanded further in the Hyper Connected society. To solve these problems, we should look forward to a change in the priority of other laws and policies other than criminal law.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.57-69
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• 2020

As more people share their opinions in online communities, such as Internet portals and social networking services, more opinions are manipulated for the benefit of particular individuals and groups. In particular, when manipulations occur for political purposes, they influence election results as well as government policies and the quality of life. This type of manipulation has targeted the general public, and their analysis and detection has also focused on such manipulation. However, to more efficiently spread propaganda, recent manipulations have targeted common interest groups(e.g., a group of those interested in real estate) and propagated information whose content and style are customized to those groups. This work characterizes such manipulations on common interest groups and proposes method to detect manipulations. To this end, we collected and analyzed opinions posted on 10 common interest groups before and after an election. As a result, we found that manipulations on common interest groups indeed occurred and were gradually increasing toward the election date. We also proposed a detection system that examines individual opinions, their authors, and their collaborators. Using the collected opinions, we demonstrated that the proposed system can accurately classify more than 90% of manipulated opinions and that many of these opinions were posted by multiple collaborators. We believe that regular audits of opinions using the proposed system can quickly isolate manipulations and decrease their impact. Moreover, the proposed features can be used to identify manipulations in domains other than politics.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.29-39
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• 2020

Online communities, such as Internet portal sites and social media, have become popular since they allow users to share opinions and to obtain information anytime, anywhere. Accordingly, an increasing number of opinions are manipulated to the advantage of particular groups or individuals, and these opinions include falsified product reviews and political propaganda. Existing detection systems are built upon the characteristics of manipulated opinions for one particular time period. However, manipulation tactics change over time to evade detection systems and to more efficiently spread information, so detection systems should also evolve according to the changes. We therefore propose a system that helps observe and trace changes in manipulation tactics. This system classifies opinions into clusters that represent different tactics, and changes in these clusters reveal evolving tactics. We evaluated the system with over a million opinions collected during three election campaigns and found various changes in (i) the times when manipulations frequently occur, (ii) the methods to manipulate recommendation counts, and (iii) the use of multiple user IDs. We suggest that the operators of online communities perform regular audits with the proposed system to identify evolutions and to adjust detection systems.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.145-162
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• 2023

This research investigates how users of Bilibili, a video sharing website based in China have responded to carbon neutrality. By conducting quantitative textual analyses on 3,311 comments on Bilibili using LDA topic extraction and content statistics, this research discovers that: (1) Bilibili users have assigned more weight to geopolitical topics (56.3%) than energy (22.0%) and environmental topics (21.7%). (2) When assessing carbon neutrality, Bilibili users considered geopolitical (53.8%) and energy factors (15.8%) more heavily than factors related to the class (9.2%), economy (8.9%), environment (8.7%), and definition (3.6%). (3) More Bilibili users had negative (64.6%) attitudes towards carbon neutrality, with only a small portion of them expressing positive (26.8%) and neutral (8.6%) attitudes. (4) Negative attitudes towards carbon neutrality were mainly driven by geopolitical concerns about the West's approach to China, other countries' free-riding on China's efforts and the West's manipulation of rules, doubts about the feasibility of energy transition and suspicion of capitalists exploiting consumers through this concept. This research highlights the geopolitical concerns behind the environmental attitudes of Chinese people, deepening our understanding to psychological constructs and crisis sensitivity of Chinese people towards environmental issues.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2014

After emergence of Internet, social media with highly interactive Web 2.0 applications has provided very user friendly means for consumers and companies to communicate with each other. Users have routinely published contents involving their opinions and interests in social media such as blogs, forums, chatting rooms, and discussion boards, and the contents are released real-time in the Internet. For that reason, many researchers and marketers regard social media contents as the source of information for business analytics to develop business insights, and many studies have reported results on mining business intelligence from Social media content. In particular, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, as a technique to extract, classify, understand, and assess the opinions implicit in text contents, are frequently applied into social media content analysis because it emphasizes determining sentiment polarity and extracting authors' opinions. A number of frameworks, methods, techniques and tools have been presented by these researchers. However, we have found some weaknesses from their methods which are often technically complicated and are not sufficiently user-friendly for helping business decisions and planning. In this study, we attempted to formulate a more comprehensive and practical approach to conduct opinion mining with visual deliverables. First, we described the entire cycle of practical opinion mining using Social media content from the initial data gathering stage to the final presentation session. Our proposed approach to opinion mining consists of four phases: collecting, qualifying, analyzing, and visualizing. In the first phase, analysts have to choose target social media. Each target media requires different ways for analysts to gain access. There are open-API, searching tools, DB2DB interface, purchasing contents, and so son. Second phase is pre-processing to generate useful materials for meaningful analysis. If we do not remove garbage data, results of social media analysis will not provide meaningful and useful business insights. To clean social media data, natural language processing techniques should be applied. The next step is the opinion mining phase where the cleansed social media content set is to be analyzed. The qualified data set includes not only user-generated contents but also content identification information such as creation date, author name, user id, content id, hit counts, review or reply, favorite, etc. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, researchers or data analysts can select a suitable mining tool. Topic extraction and buzz analysis are usually related to market trends analysis, while sentiment analysis is utilized to conduct reputation analysis. There are also various applications, such as stock prediction, product recommendation, sales forecasting, and so on. The last phase is visualization and presentation of analysis results. The major focus and purpose of this phase are to explain results of analysis and help users to comprehend its meaning. Therefore, to the extent possible, deliverables from this phase should be made simple, clear and easy to understand, rather than complex and flashy. To illustrate our approach, we conducted a case study on a leading Korean instant noodle company. We targeted the leading company, NS Food, with 66.5% of market share; the firm has kept No. 1 position in the Korean "Ramen" business for several decades. We collected a total of 11,869 pieces of contents including blogs, forum contents and news articles. After collecting social media content data, we generated instant noodle business specific language resources for data manipulation and analysis using natural language processing. In addition, we tried to classify contents in more detail categories such as marketing features, environment, reputation, etc. In those phase, we used free ware software programs such as TM, KoNLP, ggplot2 and plyr packages in R project. As the result, we presented several useful visualization outputs like domain specific lexicons, volume and sentiment graphs, topic word cloud, heat maps, valence tree map, and other visualized images to provide vivid, full-colored examples using open library software packages of the R project. Business actors can quickly detect areas by a swift glance that are weak, strong, positive, negative, quiet or loud. Heat map is able to explain movement of sentiment or volume in categories and time matrix which shows density of color on time periods. Valence tree map, one of the most comprehensive and holistic visualization models, should be very helpful for analysts and decision makers to quickly understand the "big picture" business situation with a hierarchical structure since tree-map can present buzz volume and sentiment with a visualized result in a certain period. This case study offers real-world business insights from market sensing which would demonstrate to practical-minded business users how they can use these types of results for timely decision making in response to on-going changes in the market. We believe our approach can provide practical and reliable guide to opinion mining with visualized results that are immediately useful, not just in food industry but in other industries as well.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.150-165
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• 2016

This study aims to analyze types of science museum worksheets developed by elementary pre-service teachers and their perspectives on the requirements and necessity of science museum worksheets. As analysis subjects, this study selected 38 kinds of worksheets and reports developed by 114 elementary pre-service teachers who were in the third year of university of education. In this study, the science museum selected for elementary pre-service teachers to develop worksheets was a national science museum, composed of 'Nature and Discovery Museum', 'Science Technology and Industry Museum' and 'Children's Museum', which was located in a metropolitan city and opened in 2013. The results of this study can be summarized as follows; Firstly, as a result of analyzing the science museum worksheets developed by elementary pre-service teachers, this study found out that the experience type with hands-on and observation techniques applied was most, and as an approach method, direct manipulation, look-in observation and close observation were most. However, although these science museum worksheets were experience-oriented, many of them were survey-oriented ones that suggested too many questions through various exhibits. Secondly, as a result of analyzing requirements of science museum worksheets elementary pre-service teachers thought and described through the word tree of NVivo 10, this study extracted 10 kinds of main themes, out of which the requirement, 'A limited amount of activity should be required', showed the highest frequency. Thirdly, as a result of analyzing the necessity of science museum worksheets elementary pre-service teachers thought and described through the word tree of NVivo 10, this study extracted 9 kinds of main themes, out of which the opinion, 'It is required to help students check an exhibit which may be passed by', was most.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.9
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• pp.530-538
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• 2002

In this paper, we propose a new caching strategy for web servers. The proposed algorithm collects on]y the statistics of the requested file, for example the popularity, when a request arrives. And, at times, only files with higher popularity are cached all together. Because the cache remains unchanged until the cache is made newly, web server can use very efficient data structure for cache to determine whether a file is in the cache or not. This increases greatly tile efficiency of cache manipulation. Furthermore, the experiment that is performed with real log files built by web servers shows that the cache hit ratio and the cache hit ratio are better than those produced by LRU. The proposed algorithm has a drawback such that the cache hit ratio may decrease when the popularity of files that is not in the cache explodes instantaneously. But in our opinion, such explosion happens infrequently, and it is easy to implement the web servers to adapt them to such unusual cases.