You may not have heard of the Internet Water Army before, but you’ve probably seen their handiwork. The Internet Water Army is the monicker given to a group of underground people in China who are paid to post comments on blogs and other Internet forums, often either recommending – or dissing – a product or service, or posting links. Because they are an ‘army’ of people who are paid to ‘flood’ the Internet with their spam comments, they have earned the name The Internet Water Army.
Canadian researcher Cheng Chen, a graduated student working with advisor Venkatesh Srinivasan at the University of Victoria, investigated and researched the Internet Water Army by actually going undercover, and working in the Internet Water Army for a time, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of how it works.
Among the many things that Chen discovered, was that the Internet Water Army posts have certain qualities (or lack thereof) in common, making it possible to identify with some accuracy whether a comment, for example, is legitimate or posted by a paid hack.
Based on these observations, Chen and his colleagues then wrote software to automate identifying the paid postings. They claim an 88% accuracy.
“Our test results with real-world datasets show a very promising performance,” said Chen.
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How this software stacks up against spam-identifying blog software, such as Akismet, is unknown, but should they offer it commercially, it’s certainly an interesting concept.
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