MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis

TL;DR

MEWS is a real-time system that detects manipulated social media images and tracks their spread across platforms, helping identify potential disinformation campaigns quickly.

Contribution

This paper introduces MEWS, a unified pipeline combining ingestion, manipulation detection, and graph analysis for real-time social media misinformation monitoring.

Findings

MEWS can identify manipulated media as they emerge.

It tracks the spread of manipulated content across platforms.

The system detects rapid diffusion indicative of disinformation campaigns.

Abstract

This article presents a beta-version of MEWS (Misinformation Early Warning System). It describes the various aspects of the ingestion, manipulation detection, and graphing algorithms employed to determine--in near real-time--the relationships between social media images as they emerge and spread on social media platforms. By combining these various technologies into a single processing pipeline, MEWS can identify manipulated media items as they arise and identify when these particular items begin trending on individual social media platforms or even across multiple platforms. The emergence of a novel manipulation followed by rapid diffusion of the manipulated content suggests a disinformation campaign.