Congratulations to Keenan Jones, currently undertaking a PhD in Computer Science at the School of Computing, who has been highly commended for his poster on ‘Hacktivism and Social Media: Analysing the Anonymous Collective on Twitter‘ for the SPRITE+ Showcase: Research Snapshot poster competition.
Keenan’s research involves the application of computational methods to analyse the behaviours of cybercriminals online, and his PhD focuses on the development of techniques to analyse the authorship of online texts posted by cybercriminals.
The research poster is based on the paper ‘Behind the Mask: A Computational Study of Anonymous’ Presence on Twitter‘, co-authored by Keenan, his supervisor Dr Jason Nurse and Professor Shujun Li, which also received a best paper Honourable Mention award at the 14th International AAAI conference on Web and Social Media.
With the rise of hacktivist groups, questions abound regarding their strange social structure and the role these groups will play as potential warriors of cyber justice, or vectors of digital harm. In order to better understand the unusual nature of these actors, the researchers utilise computational methods to analyse the behaviours of the hacktivist group Anonymous on social media. To this end, the researchers first used machine learning to identify a large network of more than 20,000 Anonymous affiliates on Twitter. They then utilised a combination of social network analysis and centrality measures to examine how influence is distributed throughout this Anonymous Twitter network, finding that the group is centred around a small number of highly influencer accounts. The researchers also tracked the Anonymous network’s evolution over time, finding that the group has suffered a significant loss in membership since its peak in the early 2010s. This finding supports suggestions that the group fragmented as a result of the arrest of key members during this period. Finally, the researchers utilised topic modelling to examine the tweet output of the top Anonymous influencers. This analysis identified a close similarity in the topics being tweeted, suggesting a unity in group interests their previous claims. These results offer new insights into the manner in which public facing hacktivist groups are organised on social media, identifying evidence of a more centralised structure within Anonymous than the group claims, reliant on a small number of key individuals.
Keenan’s highly commended research poster and his accompanying lightning talk can be found here:
https://spritehub.org/hacktivism-and-social-media-analysing-the-anonymous-collective-on-twitter/