Publications

Human-Constrained Indicators of Gatekeeping Behavior as a Role in Information Suppression: Finding Invisible Information and the Significant Unsaid

Bandlow, Alisa B.; Murchison, Nicole M.; Ting, Christina T.; Wisniewski, Kyra L.; Zhou, Angela E.

To date, disinformation research has focused largely on the production of false information ignoring the suppression of select information. We term this alternative form of disinformation information suppression. Information suppression occurs when facts are withheld with the intent to mislead. In order to detect information suppression, we focus on understanding the actors who withhold information. In this research, we use knowledge of human behavior to find signatures of different gatekeeping behaviors found in text. Specifically, we build a model to classify the different types of edits on Wikipedia using the added text alone and compare a human-informed feature engineering approach to a featureless algorithm. Being able to computationally distinguish gatekeeping behaviors is a first step towards identifying when information suppression is occurring.