A new, emergent cybersecurity frontier is information manipulation, whereby adversaries may attempt to distort information to influence opinion, thought, or action. Information manipulation can take many shapes and forms, from blatant attacks such as search-poisoning, misinformation such as bogus on-line reviews, to subtle distortion such as personalized search and biased news. Left unchecked, information manipulation can harm our economy, culture, and democracy. Past research efforts have been ad-hoc and focused on specific kinds of information manipulation. This work aims to lay the foundations of research in information manipulation. There are three research components: (1) surveying the long line of relevant scholarly work on information manipulation, and investigating how the established types of manipulation play out on the Internet and if the Internet gives rise to novel types of manipulation, (2) generating an overarching conceptual framework about information manipulation to capture the basic properties of various forms of existing and possible manipulation practices on the Internet, and (3) developing taxonomy of information manipulation that facilitates the development of general countermeasure for each category of manipulation. This project is tightly integrated with social-science research. In particular, political and social behavioral study identifies the important insights from at least two millennia of scholarship on information manipulation and help define models of the actors, goals, mechanisms, and strategies of information manipulation in the Internet era. The historical perspectives and conceptualization of information manipulation provide the foundation for developing a comprehensive framework to counter information manipulation.
EAGER: The Conceptual Landscape of Information Manipulation