Welcome to Developing Interfaces for Social Network Experiments’s documentation!

Introduction

‎‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎Social networks have become an essential part of our daily life. Millions access news and information through these platforms; However, these platforms can also be used as a tool to manipulate the public by disseminating automated false information with malicious content. Consequently, misinformation affects many areas of our lives, such as politics, financial markets, health industry, and many more (Gu et al., 2017, Pliviano et al., 2017, Kogan et al., 2020). Hence, this project aims to develop a system for online social network experimentations, a dashboard for configuring experiment settings, and agents that can automatically perform on the online platforms.

• Getting Started
  • Install Docker
    • Set up the repository
    • Install Docker Engine
    • Install Docker Compose
      • Install Compose on Linux systems
    • Manage Docker as a non-root user
• Mastodon Docker Setup
  • Setting up
  • Installing Docker containers
  • Docker Compose and and environment files
  • Building the app
    • DNS Configuration
    • Reverse Proxy
      • Caddyfile Configuration
  • Launch Mastodon
  • Creating accounts
• Dashboard and API
  • Local development
    • Install dependencies
    • Preview the project
  • Deployment
    • Dockerize the Streamlit web-app
• Project Components
  • Steamlit
  • Pure.py
  • Creating an actual Mastodon API instance:
    • Register
    • Login
      • Pure object’s functionality :
  • Main.py
  • Bot Template
    • Running the bot
  • Resources

Contribute

• Source Code: https://github.com/Jeren-A/Developing-interfaces-for-social-network-experiments

Support

If you are having issues, please let us know.

License

The project is licensed under the MIT license.

References

• Gu, L., Kropotov, V. & Yarochkin, F. The fake news machine: how propagandists abuse the internet and manipulate the public. TrendLabs Research Paper, Trend Micro (2017). https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake-news-machine-how-propagandists-abuse-the-internet.pdf.

• Kogan, Shimon and Moskowitz, Tobias J. and Niessner, Marina, Fake News in Financial Markets (November 11, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3237763 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3237763

• Pluviano S, Watt C, Della Sala S (2017) Misinformation lingers in memory: Failure of three pro-vaccination strategies. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0181640. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181640