Researchers Adapt AI With Aim to Identify Anonymous Authors

With disinformation on social media a significant problem, the ability to identify authors of malicious articles and the originators of disinformation campaigns could help reduce the threat from such information attacks. At the Black Hat Asia 2020 conference this week, three researchers from Baidu Security, the cybersecurity division of the Chinese technology giant Baidu, presented their approach to identifying authors based on machine learning techniques, such as neural networks. The researchers used 130,000 articles by more than 3,600 authors scraped from eight websites to train a neural network that could identify an author from a group of five possible writers 93% of the time and identify an author from a group of 2,000 possible writers 27% of the time. While the results are not impressive, they do show that identifying the person behind a piece of writing is possible, said Li Yiping, a researcher at Baidu Security, during his presentation on his team's work. "Most fake news is posted anonymously and lacks valid information to identify the author," he said.